Moving really old and unused code out of the kernel just to get less AI-assisted bug reports is IMO one of the best consequence ever of AI.
I love it.
We should start trimming the fat out of everything.
I have 10 year old servers I'm still using because they run fine with linux.
It's naturally de-ossifying and forces uptake of new methods and practices.
It gives you an opportunity to question assumptions and do things greenfield again.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
One of my buddies was infamous for a while for being the "I deleted X lines of code today" guy.
I, too, am a fan of RFC 1925.
Everyone is afraid of breaking users until Torvalds says it’s ok.
Obviously, the parent is /s, but when I read this, I thought Linux was removing exploit paths that exercise rarely-used features.
On phone OSes at least, quirky rare formats and features are (were?) a common source of exploitable bugs.
There’s presumably plenty of code bloat in the kernel, and while no human would ever scan for bugs in a corner of the kernel that hasn’t been used or touched in decades, AI 100% will. And while those bug reports might be useless as bug reports, they seem promising as “why is this code even here?” flags.
I guess end users can not upgrade but a definition of obsolete would be nice.
To me, every HP printer ever is obsolete. But I assume someone else has an equally valid and different opinion. How does that go with computer hardware?
blog post (pretty sure I've seen it on HN before) on the topic:
! Title: Hide Anubis Image
*/.within.website/x/cmd/anubis/static/img/*.webp$image
Looking at kernel commits, it looks like the driver may have been fixed since, but I'm scared to use it after it had such major brokenness in that version.
Personally: I used NTFS3 and it was alright. If anything the biggest thing I got hit by was an issue where the udisks2 mount call from Dolphin would result in NTFS-3g specific flags getting sent to it, causing the mount to fail. But in actual usage it actually worked just fine for me.
I think users moved on when they saw no real harm in continuing to use it.
Did I miss something about this or is it just another number?
So, a number.
But 7.1 new features can still be exciting.
Exciting and risky things are always under flags, so if you really care you just build, configure, and bench your own kernel+system.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/711a9c018ad252b2807...
Hope it gets to Fedora soon!
https://lore.kernel.org/all/99Mv9QEceyPrQhSP52MtAVmz0_kWJmzq...
Looking forward to 7.1 rolling out soon.
The other day I tried to install fedora 44 on a friend's computer. He wanted kde so we set that up and whoops, no way to start programs on the discrete video card. I hacked around it by starting xorg, setting an alias and environment variables, but it was a bit embarrassing to see that things have regressed.