"While explaining the new splice() and tee() buffer management system calls, Linus Torvalds made reference to some possible future extensions. This included vmsplice(), a system call since implemented by Jens Axboe "to basically do a 'write to the buffer', but using the reference counting and VM traversal to actually fill the buffer." Reviewing the implications of using such a system call lead to a comparison with FreeBSD's ZERO_COPY_SOCKET which uses COW (copy on write)."
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Member since:2005-06-29
People developing Unix programs don't do what's better suited to their needs.... They end up having to support both and get irritated and wish they could just pick one.
And if they can just pick one, they often just use the least common denominator.
Anyway, Linus isn't a PR guy, he's an engineer/hacker. He's gonna piss and moan on mailing lists about technical things and call names. That's why he's a hacker and not a PR guy...
And I think _this_ is precisely why he dislikes fame: He wants to be able to call names without the world crying about it.
Member since:2005-12-18
Member since:2006-01-01
A lot of engineers don't present themselves in such a manner in "public" unprovoked. While Linus and anyone else can say, "that's just Linus for you," explaining it through his profession appears to do more to denegrate engineers than to support Linus.
Why people completely unrelated to the matter have to have fits about decorum, and spread these regular "OMG LINUS IS REALLY AN ASSHOLE" events far and wide is beyond me. Oh my, software celebrities do things that might appear rude to someone else. It's like he's a normal person, only like, you totally know him from the Internet. So like, let's talk about and judge him on the Internet. I bet he like, drives down the highway with his child dangling out of a window, too. Like, technical matters are like, totally too esoteric for me, so like, let's gossip n' stuff.
Member since:2006-01-02
I think Linus only expresses his optionions such a strong way only if he thinks he _really_ is right. His emails are both entertaining and informative. Sometimes you have to be impolite to get people's attention. I think what he writes actually is good PR (not that he really cares about that much).
Member since:2005-07-06
Actually people programming Unix usually have most of this abstracted away by their LibC, and the result is usually abstracted by application-development libraries like Glib and Qt. In fact, directly referencing anything in /usr/src/kernel/includes is normally a horrible, horrible thing to do for an application, as it risks tying it down to a specific version of the kernel, let alone a specific kernel. This is paricularly true of Linux, which has never bothered to standarised it's API in any meaningful sense.
Member since:
2005-08-10
For crying out loud. Linus can do it his way, the FreeBSD devs can do it their way, and the rest of us can try each to see which is better suited to our needs. Damn. And people say that Theo is "difficult..."