Comment by qwertyuiop924

It's not a similar situation at all: Linux doesn't break POSIX semantics (well, not here: MADV_DONTNEED has an... "interesting" interpretation of POSIX, so there's at least one violation, but that's not the exact topic of discussion, and seeing as it's not one of the most used syscalls in POSIX, it's less of a problem. Although it's still bad. If you're interested in the sins of the Linux kernel, you can go see Bryan Cantrill's lightning talk on the subject).