Linux maintainer rejects patches from sanctioned Russian Baikal Electronics
lore.kernel.org
lore.kernel.org
Intel, Apple, etc are refusing to suppy to RU. Subpar but available parts started making sense.
Linux support enables civilian use exactly; military users likely depend on the mainstream kernel a lot less.
Sanctions created an opportunity and developers are desperate to grasp it.
These are general purpose processors and there are plans to deploy them widely across Russian civil service and major state owned banks.
They are indeed sub-par compared to Intel or ARM however in the present situation Russia is faced with a choice between importing electronics through grey channels and developing its own national product even if it is subpar to what would have been normally available.
I personally very much hope the 2nd choice is taken, domestically designed processors take hold and the world gets a new choice of hardware to use.
AFAIK the Linux Foundation is a US non-profit, and many core kernel developers, such as Linus Torvalds and Greg KH reside in the United States.
I think almost no one agrees that it should be completely separate; there should be some distance, yes, but all these things do exist in the same reality and that can't always just be ignored. Should Linux also accept North-Korean patches for their ICBMs in mainline? Probably not. They can't prevent Linux from being used in them, but they also have no obligation to go our of their way to review, merge, and maintain the code for it.
There is a lot of grey area and you can argue about the specifics of various situations for ages, but there clearly is a point where politics and the intended purpose of patches do matter.
While NK is probably not looking to merge their `char/icbm` driver to the mainline tree, what about the NK military fixing a nasty bug in the memory allocator? Should the patch be rejected even if it improves a non-military subsystem, just because of who wrote it?
It's just food-for-thought, personally I do not care one way or the other. As you say, it's all a grey area, and there is not a clear answer, which is where politics and posturing, rather than pragmatism, thrives.
My main point was to nuance the absolutist "code and science should be separate". I don't know enough about this code to make a judgement one way or the other: as I understand the commit message it's a cleanup as a prelude to GMAC and X-GMAC SoC support. Maybe the code is badly in need of some cleanup, or maybe it's essentially just fine and there is no reason to merge any of this beyond supporting those SoCs.
For another option, is it possible that patching a legitimate bug could open up a line of attack in an otherwise unrelated piece of code that the bug was somehow blocking? If it is, even legitimate, verified bug fixes, or even bug reports, from non-trusted sources, should be carefully vetted.
Somehow I should be agreeable to US weapons teams mainlining patches say for whatever weapon killed that random.man and his children during the fall of Kabul. But not a nasty North Koreans?
No one is saying that citizens and corporations of non-aligned countries shouldn't submit patches which are accepted by the maintainers. They're saying that citizens and corporations of countries which are engaged in hot, cold, or proxy wars with the countries of citizenship of the maintainers shouldn't have patches accepted by said maintainers.
And for your users too.
It's very rich to claim I'm too emotionally invested (because I'm rationally assessing the situation??) in the topic then go one about the emotional investment (comfort) of the maintainer to justify their view...
That's classic projection.
This is not rational. It's an emotional interpretation of what was written.
But definitely Russian, North Koreans and Iranians shouldn't.
It's like I'm stuck in a Top Gun movie...
Perhaps other people in this thread also think it's problematic that any military or intelligence agency submits patches. But that wasn't what the post is about. It's about a Russian military-associated company. And that's what most of the comments I read were commenting about.
If you want to channel the conversation to your hobbyhorse you can, and did. But that doesn't mean the people who respond negatively to your comments don't agree in general with you. It seems to me that national militaries should be maintaining their own kernels. And just for precautionary purposes intelligence agencies/companies (whether national or private sector) should be generally banned from kernel submits. Bug reports and exploit reports are another thing, but they are too motivated to insert backdoors and exploits due to the nature of their business.
Is the discomfort based on technical, or legal, or moral/political reasoning?
What's that rule that every argument on the Internet eventually devolves into something about the Holocaust or Hitler or something like that?
If a German, during WW2, or heck even WW1, submitted an article to a British journal on improvements to industrial equipment, and did so on BASF letterhead and with a correspondence address to BASF's headquarters, companies in the allied nations would be right to think twice before implementing those improvements, or even making comments on those improvements.
What the community could be doing instead of refusing useful patches enhancing support for an IP-core licensed from a western company is working with Baikal developers to ensure that desktops/laptops built on their hardware include no closed source software blobs anywhere in the drivers or in EEPROM.
How often do we have an opportunity like this?
http://techrights.org/2022/10/27/red-hat-lockheed-martin-ray...
Because the patch was actually published already fully (in the mail list), if I understand it correctly.