Linus On GEM Patches: UNTESTED CRAP

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linus On GEM Patches: UNTESTED CRAP

Yesterday we shared that the patches for Intel's GEM (the Graphics Execution Manager) were submitted for inclusion into Linux 2.6.28. Those patches that added in GEM along with a few other Direct Rendering Manager improvements have landed into the mainline Linux git tree, but not without commentary from Linus Torvalds. Linus became outraged over new DRM warnings and what Linus describes as horribly bad code...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=Njc5Mg

[chithanh]

drivers/gpu/drm/drm_proc.c:525: warning: format ?%d? expects type ?int?, but argument 3 has type ?size_t?

The assumption that sizeof(int) == sizeof(size_t) makes one wonder whether the code was intended to run on 64 bit platforms at all.

[KDesk]

Is this not wrong?
The Torvalds answer was for Dave Airlie, not for yesterday's David Airlie patch

http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.dri.devel

[SheeEttin]

Is it just me, or is there a certain image of Linus being painted here?

[smitty3268]

A little misleading

Is it just me, or is there a certain image of Linus being painted here?

The message ended with:

I really wish people were more careful, and took more pride in trying to
write readable code, with small modular functions instead. And move those
variables down to the block they are needed in.

Anyway, I pulled the thing, but _please_ test this cleanup and send it
back to me if it passes your testing. Ok?

Which isn't exactly what I think most people would expect after reading the story here.

[ethana2]

If Ballmer and Gates had as much sense as Linus maybe Windows wouldn't suck as bad.

...but at this point I'm afraid, it's too ****ing late.

[DanL]

I don't always agree with Linus' views, but can you blame him for blowing his lid when he has to repeatedly remind certain people of certain policies?

[hubick]

Let me say thanks to Linus! As one of the many users running x86_64 Linux who has to live with crappy developers not writing 64bit clean code, thank you Linus for yelling at the Intel guys for not having a single person on their team using x86_64!

[Tillin9]

I also think the news blurb is a little misleading, since Linus' response is generally level headed, even more so considering his usual demeanor. I agree with Linus, that code is crap. There is absolutely no excuse for that kind of sloppyness, especially since these don't seem like merging bugs (i.e. the GEM devs were working with slightly different code), but general API, kernel, and C programming bugs. I work on a much less important open source project than the Linux kernel and if any developer tried to commit code to trunk that gave plain old gcc warnings, they would likely have their privileges revoked.

[deanjo]

Unfortunately, some developers are satisfied with code that is "good enough" and don't take pride in their work.