Transcript
False meme image that says “bad news ipv4 fans. linus torvalds has announced removing ipv4 support from the linux kernel after the maintainers of the network stack got into a fight over WHAT KIND OF HRT gives the best results. this incident will impact 5 billion people and will make 95% of all network equipment on Earth binnable.” with fake screenshots of the linux kernel mailing list a girl calling another one a slur from 4chan over HRT choices and Linus Torvalds saying he will drop IPv4 support and asking the maintainers to learn to shut the fuck up.
Is this real? I thought that Linus has improved his demeanor a bit in the recent years?
You can easily tell it’s fake. Linus would never censor “fuck”.
He did here:
Thank you for the clarification, I’m stupid and could not tell
Linus have stated multiple times that he does not break user space, thus this quiet clearly cannot be real.
The kernel has never committed to a guarantee that userspace have IPv4 available. Hell, I’m sure that you don’t even need to compile it into the kernel.
goes and runs make menuconfig
Yeah,
CONFIG_INET=nand you’ll have no TCP/IP in your kernel.We have MAC addresses for all of our devices. Surely that should be sufficient!
IT’S ON THE INTERNET! IT MUST BE TRUE!
No it’s not real, even the follow up has the date of Sat, Aug 15th, 2025.
Saturday is the 16th.
There is a lot of other issues people have pointed out but right out of the gate that one is clear sign of it being fake.
Only if you still use the obsolete Gregorian calendar. Linux support for this was dropped as well
I mean, it’s a joke in any case, but you mean is it a joke on the linux-kernel mailing list or someone making a joke elsewhere?
goes to check
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/?q=torvalds
I don’t know the purported source of the original text, but the “follow-up” is supposed to be on the 15th to the linux-kernel mailing list. I don’t believe that that is an actual email from Torvalds. The most-recent email Linus has sent to the linux-kernel mailing list that shows up here is on the 13th, “Re: [PATCH] cleanup: Fix unused guard error function with DEFINE_CLASS_IS_COND_GUARD”.
EDIT: Also, looking at the list archives, while he does appear to use an indented “Linus” as his signature file, unlike the “follow-up” image, it does not have a leading hyphen.
EDIT2: Also, looks like Torvalds is in the “surround a word with underscores” school of emphasis, rather than “surround a word with asterisks”, a la the “follow-up email”.
Since we are not making jokes on feddit (they might upset the mods) it must be LKML. They’re known to spend their days fooling around.
No, I mean, like, the submission here was sourced from a thread on Mastodon. I couldn’t tell from a quick glance at the text whether it was actually people joking on a mailing list or whether it was people on Mastodon joking about fictional emails.
This is not real.
Nah, eggs don’t simmer down until they crack. I’m thinking a name like Sun-il would be cute. Might dictate North Korea later.