Zack’s Kernel News

This edition of Zack’s Kernel News is dedicated to Andre Hedrick, a prolific kernel hacker who committed suicide in July. He did tons of kernel work for many years on the IDE driver, and later the ATA subsystem it morphed into.

I remember him as being one of the more argumentative of kernel folks. He always seemed to be explaining why something was absolutely required or something was absolutely impossible because of the convoluted insanity of IDE hardware. The problem often was: There are hardware standards, and then there is reality. Often the hardware manufacturers didn’t quite conform to the standards, but Linux had to support them anyway. Sometimes the standards themselves had missed some crucial nuance. Andre undoubtedly found it frustrating to debate such issues with people who he felt didn’t fully understand the hardware under discussion.