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20041218 Saturday December 18, 2004

Linux kernel has 1000 bugs

An extensive review of the Linux kernel revealed 1000 bugs - this is meant to be good? The kernel is the smallest and most important part of an operating system, yet this figure is considered to be good by virtue of it's low rate compared to "commercial software". Sorry guys, but this doesn't fly; the base of any long-lived software stack has fewer bugs, and a rate of 1.7 per 10k lines of code in an OS kernel is pretty good but not great. But hey, soon you'll be able to compare that rate with the open source code of Solaris 10. I think you'll be impressed!

(2004-12-18 13:04:54.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Comments:

If you read until the end of the page most of those have been fixed.

Solaris 10 probably has lots of bugs like Linux 2.6, just because there's lots of new code there. Sun programmers are not magicians.

Posted by Diego on December 18, 2004 at 01:21 PM PST #

Hi Diego - I would hope those 1000 bugs have been fixed! The difference with Solaris is that extensive code reviews and automated stress tests happen *before* code changes are committed. But I didn't promise magic, I just said I look forward to seeing the results of comparisons, and I'm quietly confident they will demonstrate that Solaris has higher quality.

Posted by Colm Smyth on December 18, 2004 at 02:02 PM PST #

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