@amszmidt I wonder why you think I’m ignoring or mis-reading what the SFC has written and stated? Because I’m sadly very familiar with their statements over the years.

Do you think the California Superior court judge also misread what the SFC stated? Because that judge also found their arguments lacking any basis in reality:

The Plain Language of the Agreements does not Support the Alleged Duty

(where that “Alleged Duty” is the baseless arguments from SFC about being able to re-install on the device).

I think you didn’t actually read the ruling, and you may perhaps have read just the flim-flam garbage that the SFC put out about the completely irrelevant issue of “continuing to function properly” which was what Vizio was using as their reason for not releasing keys.

Put another way: I can read. That superior court judge can read. I think you need to learn to read. And you need to take what the SFC then says in court - and on their blog - with a big pinch of salt.

I realize that other people like the GPLv3 and wish the Linux kernel was under that license. But that is simply not the case, and never has been and never will be.

Deal with reality, not your baseless wishes otherwise.

@trashheap The “argument” by the SFC is complete garbage, and always has been. There has been no question about the license, and I have made it very clear over the years. And the SFC knows that.

So when they argue their incorrect reading of the GPLv2 in court, they are absolutely not doing GPLv2 enforcement. They are trying to further an agenda that is invalid, and always has been, and is explicitly against the wishes of the actual copyright holders.

So the SFC is just pure trash.

If they want to “protect” some project, let them protect a project that asks for it - not one that is known to not want their kind of protection.

Because what they are doing is a racket, plain and simple.

GPLv2 affirmation…

I don’t generally post here as people have probably noticed, but here’s a pdf of a recent court ruling, and this turns out to be the easiest way for me to link to a copy of it, since I don’t really maintain any web presence normally and I don’t want to post pdf’s to the kernel mailing lists or anything like that.

And the reason I want to post about it, is that it basically validates my long-held views that the GPLv2 is about making source code available, not controlling the access to the hardware that it runs on.

The court case itself is a mess of two bad parties: Vizio and the SFC. Both of them look horribly bad in court - for different reasons.

Vizio used Linux in their TVs without originally making the source code available, and that was obviously not ok.

And the Software Freedom Conservancy then tries to make the argument that the license forces you to make your installation keys etc available, even though that is not the case, and the reason why the kernel is very much GPLv2 only. The people involved know that very well, but have argued otherwise in court.

End result: both parties have acted badly. But at least Vizio did fix their behavior, even if it apparently took this lawsuit to do so. I can’t say the same about the SFC.

Please, SFC - stop using the kernel for your bogus legal arguments where you try to expand the GPLv2 to be something it isn’t. You just look like a bunch of incompetent a**holes.

The only party that looks competent here is the judge, which in this ruling says

Plaintiff contends the phrases, “machine-readable” and “scripts used to control compilation and installation” support their assertion in response to special interrogatory no. 4 that Defendant should “deliver files such that a person of ordinary skill can compile the source code into a functional executable and install it onto the same device, such that all features of the original program are retained, without undue difficulty.”

The language of the Agreements is unambiguous. It does not impose the duty which is the subject of this motion.

Read as a whole, the Agreements require Vizio to make the source code available in such a manner that the source code can be readily obtained and modified by Plaintiff or other third parties. While source code is defined to include “the scripts used to control compilation and installation,” this does not mean that Vizio must allow users to reinstall the software, modified or otherwise, back onto its smart TVs in a manner that preserves all features of the original program and/or ensures the smart TVs continue to function properly. Rather, in the context of the Agreements, the disputed language means that Vizio must provide the source code in a manner that allows the source code to be obtained and revised by Plaintiff or others for use in other applications.

In other words, Vizio must ensure the ability of users to copy, change/modify, and distribute the source code, including using the code in other free programs consistent with the Preamble and Terms and Conditions of the Agreements. However, nothing in the language of the Agreements requires Vizio to allow modified source code to be reinstalled on its devices while ensuring the devices remain operable after the source code is modified. If this was the intent of the Agreements, the Agreements could have been readily modified to state that users must be permitted to modify and reinstall modified software on products which use the program while ensuring the products continue to function. The absence of such language is dispositive and there is no basis to find that such a term was implied here. Therefore, the motion is granted.

IOW, this makes it clear that yes, you have to make source code available, but no, the GPLv2 does not in any way force you to then open up your hardware.

My intention - and the GPLv2 - is clear: the kernel copyright licence covers the software, and does not extend to the hardware it runs on. The same way the kernel copyright license does not extend to user space programs that run on it.

@corbet Did mine last week, and at least here in OR you can also sign up to get a text notification when the ballot is accepted, so I already have that too.

Now just waiting for the rest of the country to get its act together (or not, as is so sadly possible)

@gregkh @sima “eventually calling __get_free_pages”?

You have to realize that when the GFP_xyz flags were introduced - back in 1992 - “get_free_page()” was the only way to allocate memory.

So “GFP” wasn’t some odd internal thing. There was nothing else (ok, there was a very simply malloc() library on top of that “you can free and allocate one page” mode).

No “eventually” about it. It was the thing.

@kitten_tech @revk O_TMPFILE + renameat2()?

Some of you know today as π-day.

But the real insiders know that today is the 30th anniversary of the 1.0 release of Linux.

Instead of all this “spring forward” stuff, is it ok to instead just sleep in for an extra 23 hours?

Asking for a friend.

@monsieuricon I think we should do this by default on the security list.

Not for the levity, but just to counteract the “security is more important than anything else” vibes. Security researchers have this “the sky is falling” thing going on for everything, it’s very tiresome.

Being the responsible parents we are, we have Carbon Monoxide alarms in the house, because hey, it’s what you do. Right?

Of course, they have never gone off (knock wood), so you do tend to forget that they exist at all.

Well, yesterday one of those alarms decided that it needed to really remind us that it exists, and that it’s been ten years since we activated it. Because it’s now time to replace it.

Of course, nobody was home - except for the dog. Who is now traumatized by that beeping hell-box that suddenly decided that it was a good idea to tell everybody out of the blue that it needs replacing - at 95dB, just to make sure.

Kidde - I’m sure you could at least start out with just a mild chirp, instead of going full “the bark collar from hell” crazy. No?

@grillchen It’s just naturally fabulous

@eemeli Don’t do it.

Yes, it’s funny to do, and maybe git has no problems with it. Maybe.

But all the visualization tools will be ugly if they work at all. Just look at

`git show --cc 2cde51fbd0f3`

in the kernel repo and that’s a paltry 66 parents. We have a number of other “big” octopus merges, but we’ve avoided anything even that big since.

So even if things work, you just get into issues like “my terminal window isn’t that wide”.

@monsieuricon I considered it, but came up empty. Nothing struck my fancy.

@flightofdragons I do lattes. So the whole “buy beans directly from a roaster, grind them at home, and a dual-boiler espresso maker” setup.

It’s a twice-daily five-minute ritual to make a good(ish) cup of coffee.

My wife doesn’t much care, so we have a Keurig for her. She doesn’t do milk drinks, and just wants regular black coffee without the hassle.

@axboe that ‘spin_trylock_irq()’ is still potentially quite expensive in the failure case.

The trylock itself is probably fine, since it does

    int val = atomic_read(&lock->val);

    if (unlikely(val))
            return 0;

so it’s just a single read for the contended case (sill potentially causing cacheline bounces, of course, but not nearly as much as trying to get the lock). But the irq part means that we end up doing

    local_irq_disable(); \
    raw_spin_trylock(lock) ? \
    1 : ({ local_irq_enable(); 0;  }); \

so for the “I didn’t get the lock” case you end up with that extra “disable and re-enable interrupts”.

That’s all because we don’t make each spinlock variation make their own irq-safe version, so we wrap the trylock around the whole thing.

And that bfq code seems to make this worse by doing this whole thing twice, both for bfq_bic_try_lookup() and bfq_merge().

The locking around ioc_lookup_icq() in particular looks odd, in that the function itself claims to be RCU-safe, but then it also requires that q->queue_lock, making a shambles of the whole RCU thing.

Staycat.. Oh, look at that - power stayed on.

There’s real pleasure in waking up and being able to make oneself a good cup of coffee. Not the disgusting swill I’ve been making my wife on the stove when the power was out.

@tommythorn you don’t think it’s because with a fixed DRAM chip, the FPGA people in question don’t have to worry about all the nasty timing detection details (SPD etc)?

Power back.

Let’s all sing “99 bottles of beer on the wall” to see how far we can get this time before it turns off again.

@kentborg honestly, I can do both, and will in fact just switch from one to the other depending on who I’m talking to. I have no issues with °F / °C.

The point where metric wins big is when you have order-of-magnitude conversions. The whole inch/feet/mile thing still makes no sense to me. But temperature readings just don’t have that issue.

Staycation: day seven.

We had power back twice yesterday for a couple of hours each time. The weather and PGE were just teasing us, and I will not consider that a real break in the cold darkness and despair that is being without electricity.

But I still have battery power, and while it froze some more overnight and outside is now very slippery, it’s once more above freezing. So frozen pipes remain a thing of the past.

End result: I have a handful of pull requests left (most of which came in in the last few hours), and no reason to believe that I won’t close the merge window normally on Sunday.