Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)

One of his dumber takes. Virtualization replaces an ultra-functional general-purpose kernel evolved over decades to support every conceivable application with a drastically smaller "kernel" (KVM and the userland hypervisor). It's a drastic attack surface reduction, and the empirical data bears that out: kernel LPEs aren't even newsworthy (there's whole repos full of unnamed, unremarked-upon LPEs), and KVM escapes are very rare.

"Torvalds, via e-mail, says De Raadt is “difficult” and declined to comment further."

https://www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-unix-cz_dl_0616t...

Imagine being so hard you're labelled as "difficult" by no other but Linus Torvalds

Even very smart, very accomplished people can be very wrong. Xen is seeing a resurgence from Xen Orchestra and I've used it in my homelab. It's quite pleasant. I also, of course, use de Raadt's software as well.

I would love to know how OP came across this email nearly 20 years after the fact