this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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karolherbst 🐧 πŸ¦€ (@[email protected]) "MAINTAINERS: Remove myself" (chaos.social)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Following the R4L debacle "you are cancer, you are the problem, we are the thin blue line", another maintainer steps down from the Linux Kernel

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[–] [email protected] 104 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Full message from Karol Herbst on LKML:

I was pondering with myself for a while if I should just make it official that I'm not really involved in the kernel community anymore, neither as a reviewer, nor as a maintainer.

Most of the time I simply excused myself with "if something urgent comes up, I can chime in and help out". Lyude and Danilo are doing a wonderful job and I've put all my trust into them.

However, there is one thing I can't stand and it's hurting me the most. I'm convinced, no, my core believe is, that inclusivity and respect, working with others as equals, no power plays involved, is how we should work together within the Free and Open Source community.

I can understand maintainers needing to learn, being concerned on technical points. Everybody deserves the time to understand and learn. It is my true belief that most people are capable of change eventually. I truly believe this community can change from within, however this doesn't mean it's going to be a smooth process.

The moment I made up my mind about this was reading the following words written by a maintainer within the kernel community:

"we are the thin blue line"

This isn't okay. This isn't creating an inclusive environment. This isn't okay with the current political situation especially in the US. A maintainer speaking those words can't be kept. No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn. Learn what those words mean for a lot of marginalized people. Learn about what horrors it evokes in their minds.

I can't in good faith remain to be part of a project and its community where those words are tolerated. Those words are not technical, they are a political statement. Even if unintentionally, such words carry power, they carry meanings one needs to be aware of. They do cause an immense amount of harm.

I wish the best of luck for everybody to continue to try to work from within. You got my full support and I won't hold it against anybody trying to improve the community, it's a thankless job, it's a lot of work. People will continue to burn out.

I got burned out enough by myself caring about the bits I maintained, but eventually I had to realize my limits. The obligation I felt was eating me from inside. It stopped being fun at some point and I reached a point where I simply couldn't continue the work I was so motivated doing as I've did in the early days.

Please respect my wishes and put this statement as is into the tree. Leaving anything out destroys its entire meaning.

Respectfully

Karol

Signed-off-by: Karol Herbst

[–] [email protected] 67 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

For people who didnt understand the phrase like myself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line?wprov=sfla1

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago

Thanks for the context!

[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 weeks ago

it's a shame it has come to this. there needs to be some tough conversations on how the Linux kernel wants to be run over the next 5 years

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

I hope the rust kernel devs join hands with redox or asterinas project. which ultimately means more options for users.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, I'd obviously want all these devs in Linux but BSD and Redox and many others will thoroughly appreciate their talents in the meantime.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

I think a sort of Linux compatibility layer could go a long way toward making Redox more viable. It may already have one, but that seems like a good place for an ex-Linux kernel dev to work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Would also be interesting to see a Rust version of Genode

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Sorry to say it (and as much as i like C) but C is already on the path to inevitable obsolescence. Everyone is learning Rust now and fewer people are learning C. Maybe not soon, but definitely eventually. Linux can join C on this path to obsolescence or it can pivot to a language that still has a clear future.

Rust will go obsolete a some point too when the next next generation of languages come out. And software projects using Rust will have to switch languages again to stay relevant.

Don't forget that languages like COBOL was once state of the art but was replaced by... C.

That's just the computer circle of life.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago

The leadership response to this and the subsequent backlash is starting to remind me of the NixOS debacle from about a year ago.

That resulted in the project being split and like 30% of the community moving off and creating Lix.

I would be disappointed, but not surprised, if we see something similar in the Kernel sometime in the next year or two...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Is there any write-up for the recent events around the kernel and Rust? Glancing over recent posts, it seems like new devs want to push Rust, but older maintainers don't want to deal with it. Why do people love Rust so much? Is it just a loud minority or does it in fact offer substancial gains and safety over existing C code? Lqstly, can they simply fork the kernel and try their own thing? E.g. do a branch as a proof of concept and therefore convince them to migrate?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

can they simply fork?

Forking the Linux kernel will effectively guarantee that no one will run their software. None, but the most niche distros would ship it. If the Rust people are forced to fork, their time may be better spent contributing to Redox.

Why do people love Rust so much?

Rust makes it very difficult (but not impossible) to write dangerous code, whereas C pretty much guarantees you'll write something dangerous (and therefore insecure or buggy) at some point, especially in larger codebases, like the Linux kernel. Arrogant devs will defend keeping Rust out of the kernel by saying things like "write better code", but if the people writing kernel code for 20 years are still writing dangerously flawed code, it's safe to say that at a certain point, we need a better tool. That tool is Rust.

Rust also has very high-quality libraries that produce nicer finished products. I learned Rust because of clap and ratatui, which make superior CLIs and TUIs to anything else. Seriously, go use a CLI or TUI that was made in Rust. Try bat, a cat clone. You'll get easy, great command-line completions, easy-to-read help output, optional, beautiful syntax-highlighting, theming, etc. It's hard for me to go back to vanilla cat.

And I say all of that as someone that likes C. C is really fun, and it's a very powerful language, but it was not designed to be memory-safe. If it was, the people complaining about Rust would just complain about C too.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago

ratatui

That's a simply amazing pun for a library name. I really enjoy the history of kind of silly naming within linux and programming generally.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

Rust is already in the kernel and Torvalds wants more, faster. He's being obstructed by C purists, who at this point are the people who should fork the kernel if they see anything but C as heresy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

From what I remember, it's much more difficult to accidentally leak memory in Rust. Combined with the drop-in compatibility with C and the somewhat more intuitive (imo) syntax, I can see its popularity as unsurprising.

I think the biggest thing is that there aren't really that many reasons not to use Rust.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

Leaking isn't really the issue, though I suppose Rust helps with that as well. Its memory sales pitch is more about memory safety, which is not reading or writing the wrong parts of memory. Doing that can have all sorts of effects, where the best you can hope for is a crash, but it often results in arbitrary execution vulnerabilities. Memory _un_safety is pretty rare and most prominent in languages like C, C++ and Zig.

Rust also has more information contained in it, which means resulting programs can actually be faster than C, as the optimizer in the compiler is better informed.