Mastodawn

After 25+ years of kernel development, I was finally forced to touch `mm/` and it was due to a nommu "issue":
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2026042334-acutely-unadorned-e05c@gregkh/

As @axboe said the other day, we aren't expecting a box of chocolates:

https://lore.kernel.org/r/[email protected]

but these past weeks have made me feel like someone owes a few of us kernel developers a bunch of whisky at the very least...

[PATCH] mm/gup: honour FOLL_PIN in NOMMU __get_user_pages_locked() - Greg Kroah-Hartman

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Jens Axboe Apr 23

@gregkh I'll take a whisky over a box of chocolates anyway ;-)

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Jens Axboe Apr 23

@gregkh Actually I can buy my own, what I'd really like is for us to kill nommu. It has zero reason to exist, and it's largely untested garbage.

Forget the booze, that's what I want.

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Anisse Apr 23

@axboe @gregkh something @ljs would most likely agree with 🙂 cc @vbabka

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Jens Axboe Apr 23

@Aissen @gregkh @ljs @vbabka As any sane person should! Honestly, I'm hope this will be the silver lining to the slew of mostly garbage LLM bug reports - yank the old and untested code from the kernel, not just nommu.

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ljs Apr 23

@axboe @Aissen @gregkh @vbabka I already tried this, nommu is untested garbage and a hack and I hate it.

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/77ab7[email protected]/

hch of all people said:

"Nommu is a long standing and reasonable
well maintained part of the kernel, why would anyone want to kill it
for no good reason? I know quite a lot of products shipping it."

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20241[email protected]/

Also read this - https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/639c2[email protected]/

I mean honestly I'm surprised Linus allowed a new nommu arch in, and I'd rather we dump all of them.

It's a big maintenance burden, it's untested, and nobody anywhere has the slightest interest in improving any of that.

@david maybe we should isolate it to some section of maintainers (and out of one of mine ;) and treat it the way it deserves to be treated...

Yeah other than that fine with it 🤣

Re: [RFC PATCH v2 00/13] nommu UML - Lorenzo Stoakes

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wilhelm

@ljs pr_warn(“this is not a place of honor\n”); at boot #ifdef