Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Linux Has Fewer Bugs Than Rivals

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the preaching-to-the-converted dept.

sushant_bhatia_progr writes "Wired has an article stating that according to a four-year analysis of the 5.7 million lines of Linux source code conducted by five Stanford University computer science researchers, the Linux kernel programming code is better and more secure than the programming code of most proprietary software. The report, set to be released on Tuesday, states that the 2.6 Linux production kernel, shipped with software from Red Hat, Novell and other major Linux software vendors, contains 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code, well below the industry average for commercial enterprise software. Windows XP, by comparison, contains about 40 million lines of code, with new bugs found on a frequent basis. Commercial software typically has 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code, according to Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Sustainable Computing Consortium. This would be equivalent to 114,000 to 171,000 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code."

2 of 626 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Congratulations... by chialea · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm not a programmer-type either, but I'm familiar with some of this research. There are a few techniques that I've seen, but don't consider this to be complete, my research is in crypto, not code.

    1. code patterns -- if you see something that looks like a pattern, it is probably a bug... "if(x = 0)", for example. of course, you have to check that it actually IS a bug, but you can catch certain common things that way.

    2. type safety -- tools can go through your code (either statically or while it's running) and look for type violations. for example, you might write an int to an unsigned int, or mix up pointers and ints, which could be bad. you can catch a stunning number of bugs this way.

    3. pointer analysis -- another annoying bug can be in aliasing, where you have multiple pointers that may or may not be pointing at the same memory. are you really /trying/ to overwrite that data structure pointed to by another pointer? In general, this sort of analysis is hard (undecidable, off of the top of my head), but feasible in limited cases.

    I'm not sure what sorts of current tools are released by these researchers, but this is a very basic overview of the techniques I've heard about people using recently. (Repeat disclaimer: I'm a theorist.)

    Lea

  2. Re:Is anyone else bothered by this? by JudicatorX · · Score: 4, Informative
    Why does "Linux is just a kernel" suddenly not apply here?

    Linux is a kernel. The problem is that this is comparing the linux kernel to all of windows XP

    --
    "It is a good divine that follows his own instructions" - Portia, The Merchant of Venice