Survey II Your favorite kernel bug?

Survey II Your favorite kernel bug?

Posted Jul 10, 2006 20:34 UTC (Mon) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648)
In reply to: Survey II Your favorite kernel bug? by jimmybgood
Parent article: A survey on kernel quality

usbhid.c in 2.6.15

The kernel wouldn't even load because of a kernel in the USB drivers somewhere - the root cause seemed to be where someone replaced all occurrences of some pointer variable but missed one in usbhid.c and I got a "cannot dereference null pointer" crash at boot-up.

The ironic thing is that since this didn't happen on my laptop, and the only USB device attached to my desktop that wasn't attached to my laptop was a Microsoft Force Feedback Pro joystick, then it was the likely cause...

Yes, I took the above survey and made the appropriate choices for this bug. I have been fortunate not to experience the issues above with the IDE driver (or filesystem driver) others have had. In fact, this is the only bug I've noticed with 2.6 other than some differences of opinion between Jorg Schilling's cdrtools code and 2.6 kernels in general (not really a bug but rather a minor inconvenience). The USB crash was fixed by 2.6.15.4 or so (but 2.6.16 was released shortly after that).

Overall, I've been pleased with the kernel but I sometimes worry that it will get so huge and bloated as to become the same mess Windows Vista has become.

I am forever grateful for all the kernel developers' hard work, especially Andrew Morton's dedication. Thank you, Andrew!

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