| Is Linux getting buggier? |
May 08, 2006
Is the Linux kernel getting buggier? According to Andrew Morton, the lead maintainer of the Linux 2.6 kernel, in a CNET report from the LinuxTag conference in Germany, there's getting to be too much bad code in the kernel.
"I believe the 2.6 kernel is slowly getting buggier. It seems we're adding bugs at a higher rate than we're fixing them," said Morton.
Indeed, Morton thinks that so many bugs are entering the kernel that "We may possibly have a bug fix-only kernel cycle, which is purely for fixing up long-standing bugs."
But, is it really that bad?
Morton himself admits that this is simply his impression, and that he has no hard proof that the bug rate is actually increasing.
This isn't the first time that Morton has publicly been concerned about bugs in the kernel. Last year, in Canberra, Australia, he said that more attention needed to be paid to testing to avoid bugs proliferating in the kernel.
There's also a question as to whether some of these "bugs" are what most people would consider bugs.
Morton sees a failure to support "a 5-year-old peripheral that no one is selling any more," but is still being used, as a bug. To me, this seems more like a backwards compatibility concern rather than a bug.
That particular example almost illuminates a continuing problem with Linux, which is that some vendors still refuse to supply drivers or even APIs (application programming interfaces) to their hardware. In turn, this means that Linux developers must painstakingly reverse-engineer the APIs, in order to be able to write drivers for them.
Morton hasn't just been complaining about errors in the kernel. He's also been working on cleaning up the code.
Recently, for example, Morton observed that there were no fewer than 65 implementations of TRUE and FALSE in the kernel, not to mention a few private implementations of NULL. So, he replaced them with a global implementation of TRUE and FALSE in include/linux/kernel.h, which also removes all the private versions.
There's nothing in the least bit sexy about this change, but it will make the kernel much more maintainable. In turn, this will make it far easier to avoid bugs.
I think it should also be noted that in an open-source project, bugs are talked about and addressed, rather than hidden under the carpet until an unwary user falls prey to one.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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