Torvalds goes ballistic over bug in freshly released Linux Kernel 4.8

"Yes, I'm grumpy," admits Torvalds

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has spoken out over bugs that have already emerged in the Linux Kernel 4.8 commit, which was only announced earlier this week.

Torvalds, who answered the Legends of Linux questions on Computing's sister site The Inquirer earlier this week, said in one of his no-nonsense rants: "I'm really sorry I applied that last series from Andrew just before doing the 4.8 release because they cause problems, and now it is in 4.8 (and that buggy crap is marked for stable too).

"In particular, I just got this: kernel BUG at ./include/linux/swap.h:276 and the end result was a dead kernel."

There follows a bit of self-deprecation: "I should have reacted to the damn added BUG_ON() lines. I suspect I will have to finally just remove the idiotic BUG_ON() concept once and for all, because there is NO F*CKING EXCUSE to knowingly kill the kernel."

He added: "Yes, I'm grumpy."

What is notable is that Torvalds is quite happy to name and shame. "I had higher expectations of things coming in through Andrew," he said.

"Adding random BUG_ON() s to code that clearly hasn't had sufficient testing is *not* acceptable, and it's definitely not acceptable to send that to me after RC8 unless it has had a *lot* of testing, which it clearly must not have had."

And it goes on: "People who add random assert statements that kill machines should damn well not be let near the VM layer.

"And dammit, if anybody else feels that they had done 'debugging
messages with BUG_ON()' I would suggest you (a) rethink your approach to programming and (b) send me patches to remove the crap entirely, or make them real *DEBUGGING* messages, not 'kill the whole machine' messages.

"I've ranted against people using BUG_ON() for debugging in the past.
Why the f*ck does this still happen? And Andrew, please stop taking those kinds of patches! Lookie here, so excuse me for being upset that people still do this shit almost 15 years later."

Remember. Torvalds is clearly in charge and whatever your rank, if you mess with his kernel, he will call you out.