He's arguing that it already is buggy, and I agree. The fact that select doesn't work on more than 1024 fds is terrible. It's incredibly easy to break things by changing the limits. Bumping FD limits is extremely common. I'm honestly surprised I've never run into this first hand, but perhaps I wouldn't have noticed even if I had.

Sure, Lennart is perhaps the Antichrist of Linux, but I'm pretty positive he's the Antichrist we need.

The long-lived fear of breaking existing code is certainly valid, but at the same time, why not try and see what will break before we write something off. It's often not much. It's practically the only way for us to shed the crufty bits, and boy are there a lot of those.