Kernel bugs: out of control?

Posted May 11, 2006 19:04 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786)
In reply to: Kernel bugs: out of control? by k8to
Parent article: Kernel bugs: out of control?

> If the approach of continuing to re-engineer interfaces and
> systems to eliminate categories of problems offends you,
> then the linux kernel in general should offend you, since
> this has been the mode of operation since day one.

This reminds me of the recent change in Glibc, they now
abort programs which do double frees.

Yes, more programs may now be "appear unstable", but I personally
prefer application rather being terminated than silently corrupting
my data when they hobble forward with inconsistent state.
Broken apps should be shot down as soon as possible so that
people know to fix them, this is the Unix way.

If you don't force quality, you don't get it.
You end up with an unmaintainable mess instead.

> There _are_ other free unixes which have a much more
> conservative approach. They are not horrible.

I'm sure the person complaining here would then
complain about the lack of features and HW support...

to post comments

Kernel bugs: out of control?

Posted May 11, 2006 23:24 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (3 responses)

I agree with you about forcing quality... that's a great idea. If I thought the new development process would actually DO that, I'd be enthusiastically behind it. Instead, it's just about speed, speed, speed... and avoiding the stuff that's no fun to do, like bugfixing and testing.

Waving your hands in the air and expecting other people to fix your programs is not, in my long experience supporting developers, the way to get it fixed, particularly not properly.

As far as switching OSes goes, I've already stopped using Linux on my firewalls because of the unending stream of security reboots. Netfilter is faster and more featureful than OpenBSD's pf, and its language is more amenable to shell scripting, but the first mission of a firewall is to stay up. I can throw OpenBSD on a firewall and not have to update it again for a couple of years. This means no downtime, which means happy users. I've never seen any Linux kernel that lasted that long without security holes.

FreeBSD is looking better all the time... I've been talking about switching over, but haven't yet. If matters continue as they have, maybe I will. And you'll have one less complaining user, which, from your tone, you may prefer.

Kernel bugs: out of control?

Posted May 15, 2006 4:27 UTC (Mon) by ChristopheC (guest, #28570) [Link] (2 responses)

I think it is unfair to say the kernel developer do not test their patches. However, they can only test them on the few combinations of hardware they have access to.

To discover the bugs, the kernel needs wide-spread testing. But few people are willing to test the development releases (-rc) - the problem has been mentioned countless times on lkml and here on lwn. So they have to release often toge tthe needed coverage. (This is a somewhat simplified explanation, of course)

Kernel bugs: out of control?

Posted May 15, 2006 5:48 UTC (Mon) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (1 responses)

2.6.14 broke *traceroute*. Give me a break.

Kernel bugs: out of control?

Posted May 21, 2006 17:05 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Er, how often do you *run* traceroute? I don't run it so often myself that I'd notice immediately if it broke. It could easily be a week or so between runs...