Looking through this, the two biggest categories seem to be complaints about buggy/weird hardware (that driver writers have to work around) and complaints about compiler quirks. I can imagine other projects having similarly-motivated cursing at annoying library weirdnesses.
The motive seems to be to acknowledge to the reader that, yes, this code is ugly, and it's not the writer's fault; it's the product of some bugginess external to the codebase that really isn't possible to fix. Blame "fucking gcc", or Sun for having the nerve to "take such nice parts and fuck up the programming interface" (to quote two examples from the Linux code). The target of the anger is most definitely not the intended audience.
The motive seems to be to acknowledge to the reader that, yes, this code is ugly, and it's not the writer's fault; it's the product of some bugginess external to the codebase that really isn't possible to fix. Blame "fucking gcc", or Sun for having the nerve to "take such nice parts and fuck up the programming interface" (to quote two examples from the Linux code). The target of the anger is most definitely not the intended audience.