Zack’s Kernel News

Kernel News

Article from Issue 147/2013

Author(s): Zack Brown

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.

Don’t Trust Firmware

Over the course of debugging something, Marcin Slusarz remarked that the problem looked like it might be an ACPI bug, to which Linus Torvalds replied:

Here’s the #1 thing to keep in mind about firmware:

- firmware is *always* buggy.

It’s that simple. Don’t expect anything else. Firmware is written by people who have lost the will to live (why? Because they do firmware development for a living), and the only thing keeping them going is the drugs. And they’re not the ‘fun’ kind of drugs. The end result is predictable. In their drug-induced haze, they make a mess.

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