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Comment by mmooss

10 months ago

People should read it:

"... I come at this from the perspective of having worked on Linux since around December of 1991. I first met you and Tove in 1995 at the Free Software Conference at MIT that Stallman sponsored. ...

Probably the last technical contribution of my career is leading an initiative to provide the Linux community a generic security modeling architecture. Not to supplant or replace anything currently being done, but to provide a flexible alternative to the development of alternate and/or customized workload models, particularly in this era of machine learning and modeling.

Four patch series over two years, as of yesterday, not a single line of code ever reviewed. ...

We were meticulous in our submissions to avoid wasting maintainers time. We even waited two months without hearing a word before we sent an inquiry as to the status of one of the submissions. We were told, rather curtly, that anything we sent would likely be ignored if we ever inquired about them.

We tried to engage, perhaps to excess, in technical discussions attempting to explain why and how we chose to implement what we were proposing. ...

There were never any relevant technical exchanges. The discussion consisted of, we have decided to do things a certain way, no discussion, if you don't like that you should really consider doing something other than submitting to upstream Linux."

31 comments

mmooss

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bonzini  10 months ago

I don't know, dropping 17000 lines of code is probably not the best way to solicit technical discussions

(https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240826103728.3378-1-greg@enje... is the patch set in question)

  • HumblyTossed  10 months ago

    17KLoC? Maybe he should consider they’re probably still reviewing it through bloody eyes. But seriously I wouldn’t want to review that much code.

    • cutemonster  10 months ago

      I'd get mildly angry if someone sent a giant patch without having discussed with me first. (Not working with any kernel things) But a quicker "no, don't have time, probably never will" response would have been nice I guess?

  • tw1984  10 months ago

    no feedback whatsoever for 2 months - just because it was 17k lines - and you are blindly defending it? if you don't know what you are posting & talking about, then maybe you shouldn't.

    if someone is willing to put in the efforts to submit such a huge patch, how about just show them a little bit respect, I mean the minimum amount of respect, for such efforts and send them a one line reply asking them to break the patch into smaller ones.

    surely that won't take more than 45 seconds. still too hard to get the point?

    • bonzini  10 months ago

      > if you don't know what you are posting & talking about, then maybe you shouldn't

      I hate to appeal to authority, but I have been working with large cathedral-style open source projects (mostly three: GCC, QEMU, Linux itself) for about 20 years at this time and have been a maintainer for a Linux subsystem for 12. So I do know what I am posting and talking about.

      The very fact that I had never learned about this subsystem from LWN, Linux Plumbers Conference, Linux Security Summit etc. means that the problem is not technical and is not with the maintainers not replying it.

      A previous submission (7000 lines) did have some replies from the maintainers. Apparently instead of simplifying the submission it ballooned into something 150% larger. At some point I am not sure what the maintainers could do except ignoring it.

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