Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 28 Mar 2001 00:54:47 -0800 (PST) | From | Joerg Pommnitz <> | Subject | Re: "mount -o loop" lockup issue |
| |
Ah, now you are arguing semantics. When somebody writes something to improve the Linux kernel this makes them part of the Linux kernel community. The project might be a new file system or a tool to verify the consistency of certain rules. The CHECKER people set out to make a tool that finds potential bugs in the Linux kernel.
That they did. "All bugs are shallow" means, that once a potential bug is identified, it will be resolved very quickly. This happened with the CHECKER reports. False positives were immediately identified as such, real bugs were fixed almost in real time. Where did you see the scheme breaking down?
Because the bugs should have been found without the tool?
Nobody ever claimed the Linux kernel was bug free. The CHECKER people found some of the bugs still in the kernel. Without a comparison one cannot assess whether the bug rate was higher or lower than the average in complex software systems.
My impression is, that most of the bugs identified where in well contained subsystems, e.g. drivers or individual file systems. These subsystems are somewhat special. Though they are part of the kernel tree, most are only of interest for a subset of all Linux users. That's why they tend to get less testing and less eye balls. BTW, MS claims that the same is true for Windows. Most bugs are said to be in external drivers.
So, overall I think your arguments are flawed.
Regards Joerg
--- David Konerding <dek_ml@konerding.com> wrote: > No, the CHECKER people themselves didn't find any bugs. They wrote a > clever > analyzer > that finds error patterns (actually, just patterns) and submitted them. > Some > false positives, but worse, > an uncountable number of false negatives and as-yet-unknown error > patterns. > That's not "a lot of eyes", it's a few brains and a fast computer. I'm > not > saying that's a *bad* thing but I certainly don't think it's an example > of > "lots of eyes".
===== -- Regards Joerg
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/?.refer=text - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |