There’s been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list… Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer.
On Friday a set of fixes were submitted for merging into the current Linux 6.11 cycle. There were little fixes plus two big “fixes” around an rhashtable conversion and a new data structure for managing free lists in the BTree key cache. That later one eliminates the BTree key cache lock and avoids some locking contention that can appear in some multi-threaded workloads.
But this “fixes” pull request touches more than one thousand lines of code and we’re now more than half-way through the Linux 6.11 cycle. This is far from the first time that big “fixes” pulls for Bcachefs have been submitted post merge window and not the first time that it’s not strictly bug fixes but also heavier more feature-like additions being made via fixes pull requests. Linus Torvalds had enough and responded to the pull request.
The arrogance of Kent is ridiculous and he sounds like a man-child throwing a neck beard flavored tantrum whenever someone questions the bullshit reality that doesn’t actually exist. This isn’t some dumb application you can run into the ground because you can’t play well with others. This is the fucking linux kernel, and if you can’t fathom how bad it is to throw random “fixes” at the last minute instead of waiting for the next development cycle, you are the problem. I see that shit all the damn time in corporate environments and I am sick of arrogant programmers who can’t understand processes, why they exist, and why they need to be followed.