Hacker News Reader

Comment by serbuvlad | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that Linus is dismissive of security, it is that he is very much a proponent of always rolling to the latest stable release.

Linux only ever wanted to promise support for the latest release and even Linux LTS is a concession.

And CVEs are basically a useless concept if you roll. (or at least not any more useful than any other bug tracker which supports tags)

View on HN

> Linux only ever wanted to promise support for the latest release and even Linux LTS is a concession.

If he kept true of his "we don't break user space" instead of it being "we don't break user space until we do and then it's on you to deal with it" perhaps more people would be willing to run the latest release.

I have had way more issues provoked on RHEL-compatibles by RHEL's Frankenstein backporty kernel than I ever have on Arch or Nix by the latest stable kernel.

Linux LTS is much more about proprietary drivers targeting a stable internal kernel API/ABI than about anything else.

I mean… good for you. How does that help me when my software crashes because they changed some API?

Which userspace API was changed?

Internal Kernel API changes all the time which can break proprietary drivers. But userspace API has a far higher guarantee.

setsockopt changing behaviour and crashing processes.

What user space APIs have they been routinely breaking?

The ones to manage IP filtering rules for example. Those APIs are even security-critical.

setsockopt that do nothing easily go to crashing the process in later versions…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com