A survey on kernel quality [LWN.net]

A survey on kernel quality

Posted Jul 11, 2006 0:26 UTC (Tue) by jd (guest, #26381)
Parent article: A survey on kernel quality

List of bugs I have personally experienced:

CD-ROM driver stops responding. Any call to the CD-ROM driver will cause the kernel to crash.
Magic SysRq doesn't work over Broadcom 1250 terminal.
Unclean JFS partitions aren't predictable in their behaviour.
If you switch between framebuffered virtual terminals too fast, you won't get a usable terminal.
MIPS64 code is of variable quality - ZBUS and BCM1250 profiling don't work, for example. Neither does support for the Corelis or GDB debuggers.

Although not bugs I know of, there are plenty of areas where the code is ugly and possibly hiding bugs that haven't been found. This is definitely true in a lot of the QoS code and multicast code.

Definitely not bugs, but feqtures I'd definitely like to see added: KTau kernel profiling, BLUE and GREEN QoS methods, DSM and RDMA support (ccNUMA is so 20th century) and a better underlying mechanism for kernel-to-kernel communication so clustering projects can get somewhere useful. Hey, whilst I'm at it, multicast DSM and multicast RDMA would be awesome and much-needed.

Useful information: IPv6 coders might want to run the various TAHI compliance suites. At present, nobody seems to know if/how Linux is standards-compliant - either vanilla or with the USAGI patches. If USAGI turns out to be greatly superior than the standard IPv6 implementation, then the maintainers need to EITHER do some serious work on the code, OR apply the patches. If the existing system is better, then we need to know that too - if only so us IPv6 users can stop patching our kernels.

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