David S. Miller complains that CONFIG_MODULE_SIG slows down builds, and he does hundreds of allmodconfig builds every day. This complaint falls apart fairly quickly in the comments; he knows he can simply turn it off, but what about others who he simply tells to test with allmodconfig? One presumes they are not doing hundreds of …
Author Archives: rusty
Latinoware 2012
I’m keynoting at http://latinoware.org in Brazil in two weeks (assuming I get my visa in time! ). Looking forward to my first trip to South America as well as delivering a remix of some of my favourite general hacking talks. And of course, catching up with maddog!
What Can I Do To Help?
Enthusiasm is a shockingly rare resource, anywhere. The reason enthusiasm is a rare resource is because it’s fragile; I’ve seen potentially-great ideas abandoned because the initial response was a liturgy of reasons why it won’t work. It’s not the criticism which kills, it’s the scorn. So when someone emails or approaches you with something they’re …
FAQ: CCAN as a shared library?
This was asked of me again, by Adam Conrad of Canonical: “Why isn’t CCAN a shared library?”. Distributions prefer shared libraries, for simplicity of updating (especially for security fixes), so I thought I’d answer canonically, once. Most CCAN modules are small; many are just headers. You can’t librify something which doesn’t have a stable API …
1 Week to Go, and Rusty Goes Offline
Just as the Linux kernel merge window closes, I’m going offline. My wedding is exactly a week away, but I’ll be entertaining guests and doing final preparation. I’ll be back from our honeymoon and wading through mail on the 7 May. Alex’s “A Bald Target” campaign to raise awareness for TimeForKids has been a huge …
Sources of Randomness for Userspace
I’ve been thinking about a new CCAN module for getting a random seed. Clearly, /dev/urandom is your friend here: on Ubuntu and other distributions it’s saved and restored across reboots, but traditionally server systems have lacked sources of entropy, so it’s worth thinking about other sources of randomness. Assume for a moment that we mix …
Oh, BTW, I Am Engaged!
A few of my friends saw the LWN coverage of http://baldalex.org, and sent me a note of congratulations. This reveals how incredibly slack I am in maintaining connections with my disparate and distributed friends. So: I met a wonderful lady, we fell in love, and I proposed on April the 8th last year, at Mt …
A Plea For Help: Charity
I’m getting married in just over five weeks! My fiancée is raising money for charity; if we raise $50,000 by the big day, she will shave her head at the wedding. Alexandra has had long hair all her life: she’s terrified but determined, so I’m determined to help. We’re already asking for donations in lieu …
Why Everyone Must Oppose The Merging of /usr and /
As co-editor of the last edition of the File Hierarchy Standard before it merged into the Linux Standard Base, I’ve been following the discussion about combining the directories /bin, /sbin and /lib into /usr/bin, /usr/sbin and /usr/lib respectively. You can follow it too, via the LWN discussion. To summarize, there are two sides to the …
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The Power of Undefined Values
Tools shape the way we work, because they change where we perceive risk when we write code. If common compilers warn about something, I’ll code in a way that will trigger it in case of mistakes. eg: instead of: int err = -EINVAL; if (something()) goto out; err = -ENOSPC; if (something_else()) goto cleanup_something; … …