A Very Kernel Christmas

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the root, Not a process was stirring, not even a boot. The scripts were all hung by the firewall with care, In hopes that Linus soon would be there.

The daemons were nestled all snug in their sleep, While memory leaks made the swap space go deep. And me in my hoodie, with coffee so black, Was trying to find where I’d left my SSH stack.

When out on the bus there arose such a clatter, I ran to the terminal to see what was the matter. Away to the window! I gave it a bash, And cleared out the buffer to empty the trash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen code, Gave a luster of midday to the data that flowed. When what to my wondering eyes should appear, But a miniature Tux and eight penguins in gear.

With a little old driver, so lively and quick, I knew in a moment it must be Saint Nick. More rapid than compilers, his coursers they came, And he whistled and shouted and called them by name:

“Now, Debian! Now, Fedora! Now, Arch and Gentoo! On, Mint! On, Slackware! On, Red Hat and Suse! To the top of the stack! To the top of the wall! Now sudo away! sudo away all!”

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work, He patched all the vulnerabilities, then turned with a jerk. He filled all the stockings with RAM and SSDs, And gave everyone licenses—GPL, please!

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle, And away they all flew like a grep through a thistle. But I heard him exclaim, as he drove out of sight: “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a chmod 777 night!”

@novalug Love the Linux holiday cheer! Kernel poetry is a classic. 🐧