Stanford CHECKER? [LWN.net]

Stanford CHECKER?

Posted Feb 20, 2003 13:48 UTC (Thu) by wh (guest, #9477)
Parent article: Comparing free and proprietary software defect rates

I believe that the only reason why Linux has so few of these
computer-findable bugs is that the people from the Standford "Checker"
project already ran their program on the Linux source and all the bugs
found by it got fixed afterwards.

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Stanford CHECKER?

Posted Feb 20, 2003 14:33 UTC (Thu) by haraldt (guest, #961) [Link]

Still, if the Linux kernel is one of the few to have been tested this way, what does this tell us?

Stanford CHECKER?

Posted Feb 20, 2003 18:45 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Exactly: Linux came out better because it attracts public and academic scrutiny, and improves as a direct result of that scrutiny. It's not because the coders are more competent, or motivated. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. The difference is in how it improves.

Stanford CHECKER?

Posted Feb 20, 2003 19:44 UTC (Thu) by wh (guest, #9477) [Link]

True, but the story's author interprets the results of Reasoning's findings differently. Just because Linux has less memory leaks (found by the Stanford Checker) than other operating systems doesn't mean that Linux has less race conditions (not found by the Stanford Checker) than other operating systems.

Race conditions

Posted Feb 23, 2003 8:36 UTC (Sun) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Linux also has many more people looking for race conditions in it than any of the proprietary systems that they compared it to. Therefore, we can reasonably expect it to compare favorably in that area vs. the other systems.

This is not to say Linux would show well, on an absolute scale, in its number of remaining race conditions. It probably stinks. The proprietary stacks, though, probably stink far, far worse, for exactly the same reasons that they leak worse.