Josef “Jeff” Sipek

This is a continuation of the lguest: The New Kid on the Block post I made the other day.

In responses to Rusty’s patches, Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox attempt poetry.

First, Linus…

There’s a reason for [not having enough poetry in the kernel].

There once was a lad from Braidwood
With a wife and a hatred for FUD
He hacked kernels for fun,
couldn’t get them to run.
But he always felt that he should.

See?

So when you say "there’s not enough poetry", next time you’ll know why. You *really* don’t want want poetry.

Then Alan Cox replied with modified lyrics to Eleanor Rigby:

Ah look at all the laundered pages
Ah look at all the laundered pages

Handling Pages
Pick up the list and the link where kswap has been
A paging scheme
Runs down the I/O
Watching the queues that now keep me a list of the store
Who is it for

All the laundered pages
Where do they all come from
All the laundered pages
Where do they all belong

Meeting bdflush
Writing the pages of a disk file that no one will clear
No task comes near
Look at it working
Sleeping a lot in the night when there’s no pressure there
What does it care

All the laundered pages
Where do they all come from
All the laundered pages
Where do they all belong

Ah look at all the laundered pages
Ah look at all the laundered pages

Oracle DB
Died under load and was freed along with its name
No admin came
Good old bdflush
Wiping the dirt from the pages as it walks down the chain
Nothing was aged

All the laundered pages
(Ah look at all the laundered pages)
Where do they all come from
All the laundered pages
(Ah look at all the laundered pages)
Where do they all belong

Then, there was an exchange of limerics between Rusty and Alan…

Rusty:

There once was a virtualization coder,
Whose patches kept getting older,
Each time upstream would drop,
His documentation would slightly rot,
SO APPLY MY FUCKING PATCHES OR I’LL KEEP WRITING LIMERICKS.

Alan:

There once was a man they called rusty
Who patches were terribly crusty
Though his patches were right
And Linus was bright
They sat on the list getting dusty.

Rusty:

There was a poetic infection
Which distorted the kernel’s direction,
The code got no time
As they all tried to rhyme
And it shipped needing lots of correction.

And finally, Alan:

Dear Rusty I think that we know
Your code has good things to show
But an unreliable guide
To the poetic aside
Would probably steal the show

Either way, these are the people that write your operating system. :)