Linux Kernel "Getting Buggier"

Andrew Morton, the lead maintainer of the Linux production kernel, said at the LinuxTag conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, on Friday that he is worried about an increasing number of defects appearing in the 2.6 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."

Morton hasn't yet proved this statistically, but has noticed that more and more e-mails with bug reports are coming in everyday, but if he will be able to confirm the increasing defect rate, Morton may temporarily stop the kernel development process to spend time resolving bugs.

"A little action item I've given myself is to confirm that this increasing defect rate is really happening. If it is, we need to do something about it. Kernel developers will need to reapportion their time and spend more time fixing bugs. We may possibly have a bug-fix only kernel cycle, which is purely for fixing up long-standing bugs."

In the previous month have been released many sub-versions of the 2.6.16 kernel; there were times when they released two versions in the same day!

Morton discussed the 2.6 kernel development process and he tried to explain that if people want to get their code into the kernel, they should send it to him, not to Linus Torvalds, who maintains the development kernel. Andrew Morton manages the "-mm" code branch, which is where patches are tested before being added to the development kernel.

"The way an individual can get their code into the kernel is by sending it to me. I will buffer it in my [mm] tree and send it to Linus. It's fairly rare for a person to send patch to Linus and get it in. In fact Linus is fairly random at patches at the best of times. Generally, Linus will cc: it to me because he knows I'll pick it up..."

"The mm tree is what Linus' tree is going to look like in three months time. A lot of stupid bugs get in. I wish people would send me code that compiles - probably about 75 percent do... Without mm all of these problems wouldn't be discovered until they hit the mainline tree and would impact everyone's ongoing development."