Linux 7.1

The old unmaintained ISDN hardware for which the code has been removed is likely 20 years old, or so. The perfectly good laptops are usually 3-4 times younger.

FreeBSD and NetBSD aren't going anywhere and can be used for older hardware, for the amount of production and load bearing use Linux sees there's an enormous amount of cruft and garbage in it.

That's good for your personal computing, but a renewing forest fire is good for all sorts of organizations. And species. It's a very good algorithm to run.

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.

I remember working with a guy who apparently deleted more code than he added in his time at the company. I think it said more about the codebase than anything but it was good that someone was trying to make it better.

>"Perfection is achieved..."

I, too, am a fan of RFC 1925.

Is the parent really being sarcastic? I read it as genuine.

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.

Exploit paths in unloaded modules, I guess.

Chesterton's Fence only says to learn why the fence was erected, it gives no other guidance on what to do after that. There isn't too much mystery in why a device driver was made, so Chesterton's Fence yields next to nothing here.

It's ok, you can let go of Chesterton's ISDN phone pole now. Come, we have cable, we have fiber. Just for you, I'll even fire up a little hotspot from the palm of my hand as we walk away.

Presumably that old code was actually useful at the time it was added. It might not be used now, but it helped someone back then. One of the great things about early Linux was that it tried to run on every piece of hardware available. If Linus only wrote drivers (or allowed others to submit drivers) that worked on his personal computer, Linux would have never flourished this far.

Ah, it's yet another "let's paper over this firmware bug because the manufacturer can't be arsed to properly support their own product" I see.

What SoC?

Ubuntu switched to the Paragon NTFS driver by default. When I upgraded to kernel 6.5 (I think) from Ubuntu, I started getting frequent kernel panics, like every day. Soon, I noticed that I couldn't even compile a Rust project on an NTFS partition because the compiler was getting random file system errors, and compiling was at high risk of causing a kernel panic. The NTFS driver in that kernel version is just totally broken. I switched to the FUSE NTFS-3G, and then I stopped getting panics and can compile stuff again no problem.

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.

It wound up being OK, but it had a long span of time where it was virtually unmaintained and turned out to be buggy at points. The newer NTFS driver is based off of the old read-only NTFS driver which subjectively many claim is cleaner (I honestly haven't done a head to head so idk) and they're having an easier time modernizing it with support for things like large folios. Seems like a good deal to me.

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.

The Paragon v3 NTFS driver was in perpetual beta with a scary warning about data loss whenever it was enabled.

I think users moved on when they saw no real harm in continuing to use it.

But not a very accurate blogpost. "Here's why this literally cannot work (in theory)" to denigrate a system that actually works (in practice). Their goal is to convince people to stop using it because it personally inconveniences them, but they never provide an alternative solution that actually solves the problem (in practice) that Anubis actually solves (in practice). If leaving the problem unsolved (in practice) was a desirable option, the site owner would not have turned to Anubis in the first place.

Aw, but what have you against kawaii?

He's just writing about the changes since last week. Not about 7.1 as a whole. No last minute scary things means 7.1 released as planned.

But 7.1 new features can still be exciting.

yeah about 3 to 5 codes /s