Criticism of Linux rise in prominence of operating system-level virtualization using Linux has raised the profile of attacks against the kernel, and that Linus Torvalds is reticent to add mitigations against kernel-level attacks in official releases. Linux 4.12, released in 2017, enabled KASLR by default, but its effectiveness is debated. Con Kolivas, a former kernel developer, tried to optimize the kernel scheduler for interactive desktop use. He finally dropped the support for his patches due to the lack of appreciation for his development. In the 2007 interview "Why I quit: kernel developer Con Kolivas" he stated: At LinuxCon 2009, Linux creator Linus Torvalds
Operating system connected to, providing commands to and/or receiving data from the device, and on the other end, the requisite interfaces to the operating system and software applications. It is a specialized hardware-dependent computer program which is also operating system specific that enables another program, typically an operating system or applications software package or computer program running under the operating system kernel, to interact transparently with a hardware device, and usually provides the requisite interrupt handling necessary for any necessary asynchronous time-dependent hardware interfacing needs. The key design goal of device drivers is abstraction. Every model of hardware (even within the same