Linus Torvalds' brutal 2012 /proc/kmsg email: 'retroactively aborted'
seatedro · x · 2026-10-19
A repost revisits Linus Torvalds' infamous 2012 kernel mailing list reply (screenshot included) lambasting a dev for reading /proc/kmsg one byte at a time with a syscall per byte — "the cargo weighs one byte, the ticket costs a context switch." Beyond the 'retroactively aborted' insult, Linus gave an actionable fix: use the seqprintf() interfaces, which buffer the data, handle reads of any size across packetized data, and flush in a single pass. A canonical example of feedback that is both brutal and actionable.
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