Linus Fixes Kernel Regression Breaking Witcher 2 126
jones_supa writes There has been quite a debate around the Linux version of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and the fact that it wasn't really a port. A special kind of wrapper was used to make the Windows version of the game run on Linux systems, similar to Wine. The performance on Linux systems took a hit and users felt betrayed because they thought that they would get a native port. However, after the game stopped launching properly at some point, the reason was actually found to be a Linux regression. Linus quickly took care of the issue on an unofficial Witcher 2 issue tracker on GitHub: "It looks like LDT_empty is buggy on 64-bit kernels. I suspect that the behavior was inconsistent before the tightening change and that it's now broken as a result. I'll write a patch. Serves me right for not digging all the way down the mess of macros." This one goes to the bin "don't break userspace". Linus also reminds of QA: "And maybe this is an excuse for somebody in the x86 maintainer team to try a few games on steam. They *are* likely good tests of odd behavior.."
Breaking news (Score:5, Funny)
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Whoever modded you flamebait didn't get the humor. That was actually funny.
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A developer fixes a bug, and writes a comment on github.
Technically he was @-mentioned (or whatever it's called nowdays), got a notification from the GitHub thread in his email and responded to it from his email. He did not write a comment on GitHub. GitHub took his reply and posted it automatically.
Re:Breaking news (Score:4, Informative)
More like "Head Developer of the most famous and critical infrastructure project in the comunity personally fixes bug and takes the time to apologize, take the blame and talk to the users about it"
Oh and it's a bug that only affects a desktop leisure piece of software rather than a big server infrastructure project (which people thik is the only thing kernel devs care about)
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Gosh, who woulda thought that Debian Unstable is not stable.
If you don't want to go stable, I suggest you use Debian Testing, which, according to the bug report comments, was not affected.
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Spoken like a true anonymous coward. I certainly wouldn't want to sign my id alongside that sentiment and mistruth.
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You know there are reasons why Jessie is still in testing and has not been released yet? If you want something that works you should use the stable version, which is currently Wheezy.
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Not news (Score:5, Insightful)
Man in charge of kernel fixes kernel when it breaks.
This isn't news. This is what happens.
And if only MS had a similar "never break userspace" rule that applied to even the most unbelievably "casual" of software too.
Hell, I broke four apps just going to 64-bit Windows 8 from... 32-bit Windows 8.
And, I agree. Steam has 1/3rd of my 800 games working on Linux already. If we're not using those as a test-case, then why not? Sure, some will just be multi-platform ports from the same source but likely a lot of code will literally be new ports added just for Linux.
Sad to say, there are probably more games in my Steam library that work natively on Linux now, then there are Windows games on there that'll work under Wine/Crossover/etc.
Not news (Score:1)
"And if only MS had a similar "never break userspace" rule that applied to even the most unbelievably "casual" of software too."
I'm not a Windows guy but this statement is bogus. Microsoft's pain is that they care so much about userspace that they'll make design fundamental decisions around keeping userspace ABIs/APIs. This means that I can often (not always, but often) run an older version of a program fine on a newer version of Windows. On the Linux, we can often rebuild the app from source and many do.
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Switch to Linux on ARM and I've sure lots more of your binaries will fail.
I'm not convinced it counts as "breaking user-space" from a kernel code perspective though.
I don't really see how it's sad that there's more native ports than things working through a Windows environment replacement.
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Switch to Linux on ARM and I've sure lots more of your binaries will fail.
One of the central features of the amd64 architecture is x86 compatibility. x86 compatibility is not a feature of ARM.
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I'm no expert in the area but on Linux I assume having 32 bit libraries of everything you need would solve it and in the Windows case maybe his programs are just missing out on some 32 bit library somewhere / whatever. I didn't use it early on, have no issues now, have never had any issues with it in Windows the limited amount of time I've used.
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And if only MS had a similar "never break userspace" rule that applied to even the most unbelievably "casual" of software too.
You mean the same Microsoft that named their next OS version Windows 10 because Windows 9 would break a number of applications that checked OS version with string comparison on the name rather than by the actual version number?
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weird; i thought that your kind of gamer had moved on from video gaming to trolling feminists on the internet. it's a lot cheaper and more entertaining.
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Indie bundles.
Scary amount of crap thrown in with the one half-decent game you're after, for less than the price of a coffee.
If they'd been around when I was a kid, damn, I'd have played 100 times more games.
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And if only MS had a similar "never break userspace" rule that applied to even the most unbelievably "casual" of software too.
They used to. [joelonsoftware.com] Scroll down and check out the part about Sim City.
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They used to. Scroll down and check out the part about Sim City.
That's not an example of not breaking userspace by changing behavior; all the other programs which did the same thing but in a slightly different way would still fail, because they special-cased the fix. That's an example of Microsoft special-casing a critical fix to keep users on their platform, while actually breaking backwards compatibility.
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Apparently you didn't read it at all. It was a bug in the application, not a compatibility issue. DOS did not advertise the use-after-free scenario as working, it just happened not to crash.
Do you define dis-allowing "use after free" to be breaking backwards compatibility? Because I don't think it should be allowed at all, and they inserted a whitelist to make sure new applications would not rely on the behavior.
This is a single example out of many, many, many special cases Microsoft implemented in order
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Apparently you didn't read it at all. It was a bug in the application, not a compatibility issue.
Uh, dude, that's what I said. It's a special case, just for that application. It doesn't affect other applications. It doesn't speak at all to the general attitude towards backwards compatibility because it's fucking Simcity. It's not like they added this special case for Arcade Beach Volleyball, you know, the CGA game where you were ball-shaped and you head-butted a ball over a net? One step up from Pong, for DOS. It's Simcity, you can't break Simcity.
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If that happens (and Microsoft is one of the best at not breaking userspace), WIndows development would stop overnight.
Most developers are crap - and I'm sure "never break userspcae" is routinely violated by Linux as well, just it breaks little apps that no one knows about and someone either fixes it or c
And this is why MBA CEOs fail (Score:5, Insightful)
This, a thousand times this.
The one reason that people like Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, et al made such lasting impacts on not only their companies but the world as well was not because of some great business acumen but because they fixed the problems directly. Sure, they were assholes but ultimately they cared about their products and how customers reacted to them.
Degree milled MBA's don't understand this and would not have given this fix a second thought because a> they couldn't do it and b> the economics didn't make sense because some team would've had to be picked to go out, ascertain the problem, determine the solution which might be a larger fix than a one line change and now you're looking at potentially tens of thousands of dollars expense to fix a bug in a product that isn't even YOURS! It just don't make no economic sense and you'd get dinged and the next stockholders meeting.
You see this in all the industries. Apple after Steve Jobs. Car manufacturers who were eventually run by "businessmen who understood the auto markets" instead of "a car geek who understood business" the entire industry turned into regurgitated pablum with a few occasional bursts of brilliance by a car geek that broke through the red tape. I worked in the consumer electronics industry and have seen first hand how once highly held and coveted products have been turned into cheap commodities by a "fresh executive team" because it's easier to sell to the masses who don't understand the finer details of a product than it is to actually push the envelope and innovate your product into the next generation. Then, when that market dies out completely because the enthusiasts don't want your product because it sucks so the masses don't want it anymore because "it's not cool", the CEOs blame the market for being fickle.
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MBAs are the soldiers of the financial system and it doesn't matter one bit if they run their companies to the ground, because that does not hurt the system at all, in fact a failed company creates opportunities for the system to advance.
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it's not ignoring it, per se. driving hard-working decent people to poverty and desperation is analogous to firebombing Dresden.
i.e., not really necessary for the primary objective (moving line X to ledger Y), but it's an impressive show of power and has some ancillary gains ("corrects" the cost of labor downward, far downward).
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I believe he is in part convening the incredible callousness of the financial world. They don't care if peons starve as long as they can get that winter yacht.
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BSD? Minix?
Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
On one hand, you hear about him flaming out people who break shit in stupid ways.
On the other, you also hear him accepting blame for not checking things properly himself: "Serves me right for not digging all the way down the mess of macros"
Whatever his eccentricities, he sounds quite fair to me.
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erm, "Linus" not "Linux"
I see to have a macro built into my muscle-memory on that one :-)
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Serves you right for not digging all the way down the mess of macros ;-)
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I was thinking the same thing: why isn't Linus spewing his usual foul, withering, tirade at the guy who just broke something? Heck, maybe he even deserves a second meta-tirade for not providing the first one.
I recently saw a series of video interviews on YouTube that he gave. In light of the email tirades I've seen from him, it seemed remarkable that he spoke so quietly and thoughtfully in that context. And not a single curse word was uttered. Kindda makes you wonder whether his wife and kids get Dr. Je
Re:Linux (Score:5, Informative)
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It's worth mentioning, he also wouldn't flame someone for breaking the kernel like this. The time he did flame someone for a similar bug, it was because the developer not only broke userland, but also began to argue that he was correct to do so. That is when he got flamed.
This. Linus is quite clear that breaking userspace is a bug and they've already added a patch that would restore the functionality, while still blocking possible exploits - which was why they broke it in the first place otherwise they'd revert. It's tough love though, if you make a bad API - and we know that happens - you're stuck with it practically forever.
Re: sounds complicated (Score:2)
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VMware isn't great at 3d graphics,
I think the latest major release is pretty great, it completely solved a lot of the long-running graphics system bugs that were affecting whether things actually drew correctly, notably in the area of lighting effects. It still makes complex programs which already are not very good at graphics crash more, like say Simcity 4, but all in all it's quite good and even fairly complex games seem reliable when they are not already clearly massively buggy.
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No. It's much easier to just start up Steam.
Ditto for dusting off something like Sim City 3000, Kohan, or CivCTP.
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Wouldn't it be easier to run Windows 8 in a virtual machine like VM Ware on a Linux computer? Why go through WINE and possible incompatibility issues? Or buy a gaming laptop for gaming on windows? I'm sure you geeks make $30 an hour and can afford two computers.
I do a fairly limited amount of gaming but if I do any I'll do it on my the Linux desktop I built myself.
I have no interest in buying a copy of Windows just for gaming so install on a VM, it's not even a question of principal, I just can't be bothered to go through that much effort for a crappy solution.
Systemd Take Note (Score:1)
Systemd folks take note.
Don't break my user space with your selfish ideals of progress.
I didn't know my name was Linus (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
Real gamers use paper, pencils, and dice.
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Real gamers use swords and steam tunnels.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Funny)
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Real gamers know the odds and work for the casino.
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real gamers own the casino. and other large multinational corporations.
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Linux is a mess. I am trying to run Debian Wheezy (stable!) on "fully supported" laptop without any binary blob in the kernel or X server and the number of glitches and bugs is staggering: in two days of use I found that closing the lid doesn't put the laptop to sleep every time, sometimes usb drives aren't listed by 'lsblk' and of course there's no drive in the userland (gnome) then, display manager (gdm3) does not always lock the screen ... I'm giving up.
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Those small glitches were the very reason I switched from Linux to Windows. Linux is amazingly buggy on desktop these days.
From the tone of your comment it sounds like you've had some serious frustrations. Do you mind if I ask what flavor of Linux you were running, what the desktop(s) were and what were the issues you were getting? I ask because I've been exclusively using Linux for 18+ years and while I've had my share of issues (NVidia binary blobs caused kernel panics for a period of 3 years when enabling OpenGL on my X sessions. As a result it's been 6 years since I've used NVidia hardware.) I'm curious to find out what dr
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Do you mind if I ask what flavor of Linux you were running, what the desktop(s) were and what were the issues you were getting?
That is usually followed by "ah yes, that particular distro is known to be broken, no wonder you were having problems". :)
There have been various issues like the GP comment described, but I won't write a long rant about them. Right now, if I sent a letter to Santa Claus and wanted to have just one issue solved, it would be the problem where the laptop brightness goes in multiple steps under Debian-based distros such as Mint and Ubuntu. Apparently this is because there can be multiple listeners to the backli
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This has been a perpetual problem on my Lenovo W510. In one release, it did multiple steps, in the next one, no backlight control at all. I add some kernel command line options and get a crappy 4 step backlight. In the next release, I have to remove those options because my backlight didn't turn on at all with them. Now no working backlight controls (using the FN+Home/End combo on my laptop keyboard). I poke in the /sys sysfs mount at the backlight control that's registered, and can control the backlig
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I missed the key point of it being keyboard backlight, lol....
Yes, it is very safe to assume that it's the bios vendor (Lenovo in my case, acer, hp, dell, you name it in the other cases). It boils down to there not being a consistent way to control backlights across laptops.
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> "fully supported" laptop without any binary blob
You lost me right there. You're already on a religious crusade here. Getting it to work is clearly a distant goal for you. So anything else you have to say on the matter is somewhat suspect.
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On any version of windows.... but Linux always needs some voodoo and shit?
Because you never hear about the application specific voodoo that is in windows?
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See my post RIGHT below yours.
Not true.
I run school networks, and we have legacy software going back to the floppy-disk days.
I impose a 5-year limit after the manufacturer was last active because, after that, sometimes it's too much pissing about to run the program, if that's even possible.
Going to Windows 8 64-bit broke FOUR programs that work absolutely fine on Windows 8 32-bit. And I'm using images configured in exactly the same way and thus in a highly reproducible environment.
Some shit breaks on EVERY
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Going to Windows 8 64-bit broke FOUR programs that work absolutely fine on Windows 8 32-bit. And I'm using images configured in exactly the same way and thus in a highly reproducible environment.
How do you know that is not because those programs are simply poorly written, and use some Windows API in an invalid way (they may depend on undefined behavior or bugs), or have other problems ?
The reason the programs don't work is both unimportant and irrelevant. The same thing can happen on a Unixlike OS.
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The fact is Windows is so far ahead in terms of backwards compatibility that at this point that its not even funny.
It's clear that you haven't actually tried this little experiment.
Even if it were true, here's something you apparently haven't caught on to: I can completely legally and trivially install the old Linux in a virtual machine under the new Linux, and run as many copies of it as I want. I can't do that with Windows. Oh sure, I run an XP VM under Windows 7 anyway, but I wouldn't want to count on it in a business context.
On Windows, it is __TRIVIAL__ to make it so that you unzip an exe built in 2015 to a folder and run it on pretty much every single x86-based windows flavor since Windows 95.
On Linux, it is trivial to make it so that you run a shar file and run it on any Linux anyon
Re: Why do Windows programs just run? (Score:1)
I've worked as a school sysadmin as well, doing desktop engineering and working with what you are speaking of. It is ridiculous, that kind of approach to making products with no intent or ability to support things. But other companies released products using modern methods -- 10+ years ago. The blame lies partially on the people selecting the software.
However, I must say I don't have the same animosity towards Windows. I've usually figured out a way to get things to work. Windows Updates have never broken s
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The reason for this is that in Linux, Kernel and app development goes somewhat in parallel by maintainers who work with the release candidates, while on Windows every app developer needs to have the initiative to create an update for a new version of Windows and the users have to know to download the updates and install them. In Linux, these updates happen most of the time when the kernel gets updated. It sort of goes Kernel --> Drivers --> Libraries --> Applications.
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Actually, with VERY few exceptions, you can run very old userspaces with new kernels. There have been a few 'fixes' that broke old userspaces (by exposing bugs in userspace that weren't triggered pre-fix), but there's a very strict, never break userspace rule. Sometimes you have to set the correct kernel build time options, but it's expected of a person doing that to know what they're doing, or to trust their distro to know what they're doing.
Look at the recent Linux Wireless mailing list... A few weeks a
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That is pretty much exactly the opposite of what he said.