Redazione RHC : 11 August 2025 18:25
Linus Torvalds harshly criticized the first batch of RISC-V patches proposed for inclusion in Linux 6.17, stating that the changes arrived too late and contained what he called “garbage” unrelated to RISC-V and affecting common kernel headers.
He was particularly annoyed by the new macro helper make_u32_from_two_u16(), which according to Torvalds made the code less clear and made things worse. He noticed that simply writing the form (a immediately showed what was happening, while using the “helper” obscured word order and introduced ambiguity.
No, this is garbage and it came too late.
I asked for an early pull.
requests because I'm traveling, and if you can't follow this rule, at least make the pull requests *good*.
This adds various unwanted elements that are not RISC-V specific to the generic header files.
And with I really mean "garbage." This is stuff no one should send me, let alone late in a merge window.
Like this crazy, useless "helper" make_u32_from_two_u16().
That thing makes the world a worse place to live. It's useless garbage that makes any user incomprehensible, and actively *WORSE* than not using that stupid "helper."
Torvalds emphasized that such changes should not appear in the general headers, much less be made at the end of the merge window. He warned that he will no longer accept late pull requests or allow the creation of “garbage” outside the RISC-V architecture tree.
According to him, authors will only be able to retry these changes in version 6.18 and only at the beginning of the merge window, without controversial and unnecessary changes.
This story demonstrates that, even in an open and collaborative ecosystem like Linux, inclusivity doesn’t mean Accept any contribution without filtering. Open source was created to be accessible, but it requires discipline, consistency, and technical quality. As Torvalds demonstrated, integration and review rules serve to preserve the stability and clarity of the code, preventing the introduction of unnecessary or harmful changes.
But wasn’t open source supposed to be inclusive? Yes, but inclusive doesn’t mean indulgent of “garbage”: it means ensuring that every contribution is valid, useful, and well-integrated in the interest of the entire community.
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