this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
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Linux 6.19 Gets Rid Of The Kernel's "Genocide" Function (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 1 day ago by cm0002@lemmy.cafe to c/linux@programming.dev
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While the Linux kernel has inclusive terminology guidelines for the past five years to replace phrases like master/slave and blacklist/whitelist, there has surprisingly been a "genocide" function within the kernel that was questioned when it was first submitted for inclusion but now removed in Linux 6.19.

Introduced to the Linux kernel back in 2023 was the d_genocide() function as part of various dcache updates to the kernel. The genocide name was questioned when the patches were first posted by longtime Linux developer Al Viro

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[–] IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 7 points 22 hours ago

I worked on a memory manager back in the days of DOS & extended memory overlays. The original author liked to refer to blocks of memory as “cookies” and temporary variables as “handy”, among other things. My favorites however were a flag identifying memory corruption as “shit_cookie_corrupt” and a panic function when it couldn’t recover that was called ohShitOhShitOhShit().