Some tl;dr takeaways :
I was shocked that nobody had ever noticed this bug in the mainline kernel, but that’s what happened. I guess to be more accurate, the OLPC project did notice it at one point, but since they had a workaround it wasn’t a huge deal. I decided to go ahead and fix the underlying problem.
I first submitted my fix for this problem in September 2022, but I didn’t receive any responses. I ended up resubmitting it later that year and CCing the main SoC maintainers the second time, and they took care of merging my fix. It was finally released with Linux 6.2 and was also backported to several 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x kernels. Ever since I implemented this fix, I haven’t noticed any problems with CPU time reporting on my Chumby.
It was very satisfying to be able to fix the problem! The time I spent was totally worth it too. I learned all about how procfs works and how top gets its info about CPU usage. I still feel like I know almost nothing about the internals of the Linux kernel, but solving a problem like this was a fantastic way to dip my toes into it.
THIS is why I’m a firm advocate for Open Source Software.
Not because it’s better, not because it’s more secure, cheaper, sexier or any other commonly used “reason”.
It’s because having the source means that you can fix a bug for everyone, or just yourself.
This is just not possible in a closed source environment.
Tux is pretty sexy though.
There are many furries in the open source community, but somehow I have never seen a penguin furry.
Edit: I forgot that penguins are birds, lol. Birds have feathers, not fur.
Edit²: Avians/featheries seem to be a thing: https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Avian
True dat
