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by mantrax4 4456 days ago
The nerd fight tl;dr so far:

- Kay claims a system not booting due to a casual kernel log flood from systemd is not an issue.

- Linus agrees the "debug" flag (along with other generic kernel flags) should be used by services like systemd, yet blasts Kay for using it, because it "usually isn't a problem", but here "it's a problem".

- Linus threatens not to accept kernel patches from Kay.

- Kay has not written a non-trivial kernel patch for over two years, and doesn't want to write any.

- Linus agrees rate limiting should be applied on the kernel's side, but that's not a solution somehow here, because reasons.

- Kay says Linus is involved in a "childish power play".

- Linus calls Kay a "primadonna who thinks the world revolves around him".

In short: http://media.giphy.com/media/6HFUDKwlWcAbC/giphy.gif

2 comments

"- Linus agrees rate limiting should be applied on the kernel's side, but that's not a solution somehow here, because reasons."

Wouldn't it be better for the entity writing the messages to prioritize them and select the most relevant so that it doesn't write so many that the system cannot start, rather than let an entity that doesn't know the meaning of the messages arbitrarily discard most of them?

Rate limiting seems a last resort not a proper solution.

Good overview, but the kick off was that a simple bug in systemd was flooding the kernel log. Rather than ask for that bug to be fixed (possibly assuming it was intended behaviour) they asked for systemd to ignore a flag that is expressly designed to be read by things other than the kernel.

The fact that the original flood of messages was as simple bug renders the whole "territorial pissing" thing somewhat more pathetic than it appears at first.