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Torvalds Has Harsh Words For FreeBSD Devs
An anonymous reader writes "In a relatively technical discussion about the merits of Copy On Write (COW) versus a very new Linux kernel system call named vmsplice(), Linux creator Linus Torvalds had some harsh words for Mach and FreeBSD developers that utilize COW: 'I claim that Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots. Playing games with VM is bad. memory copies are _also_ bad, but quite frankly, memory copies often have _less_ downside than VM games, and bigger caches will only continue to drive that point home.' The discussion goes on to explain how the new vmsplice() avoids this extra overhead."
Netcraft confirms linux is dying. /FreeBSD user. //who am I kidding, uses linix too
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
Mod that up and spin the meat!!!
Install COX in your backend today!
IT IS OFFICIAL; WIRED NEWS CONFIRMS: LINUX IS SUPERIOR TO *BSD
*BSD is Dying, Says Respected Journal
Linux advocates have long insisted that open-source development results in better and more secure software. Now they have statistics to back up their claims.
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 FreeBSD.
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 average for FreeBSD software. FreeBSD, by comparison, contains about 40 million lines of code, with new bugs found on a frequent basis.
FreeBSD 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.
The study identified 0.17 bugs per 1,000 lines of code in the Linux kernel. Of the 985 bugs identified, 627 were in critical parts of the kernel. Another 569 could cause a system crash, 100 were security holes, and 33 of the bugs could result in less-than-optimal system performance.
Seth Hallem, CEO of Coverity, a provider of source-code analysis, noted that the majority of the bugs documented in the study have already been fixed by members of the Linux development community.
"Our findings show that Linux contains an extremely low defect rate and is evidence of the strong security of Linux," said Hallem. "Many security holes in software are the result of software bugs that can be eliminated with good programming processes."
The Linux source-code analysis project started in 2000 at the Stanford University Computer Science Research Center as part of a large research initiative to improve core software engineering processes in the software industry.
The initiative now continues at Coverity, a software engineering startup that now employs the five researchers who conducted the study. Coverity said it intends to start providing Linux bug analysis reports on a regular basis and will make a summary of the results freely available to the Linux development community.
"This is a benefit to the Linux development community, and we appreciate Coverity's efforts to help us improve the security and stability of Linux," said Andrew Morton, lead Linux kernel maintainer. Morton said developers have already addressed the top-priority bugs uncovered in the study.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
I think we are missing the real issue here. BSD is dead, so really for Linus to even bring it up is to beat a dead horse.
To achieve that speed, quality is sacrificed (the Linux kernel as a new local root exploit averaging more than once a month). Drivers written under NDA is welcomed with open arms, and this gives the open source variant of binary blobs.
the BSD guys have their reasoning and if you read more info about this it is not a shot in the dark that Linus is taking but he is frustrated that after many discussions nobody cares as much as he does on the performance issues.
Linus does not care about quality, but the *BSD does.
The "real-world" system which is saddled with Mach is, of course, OS X. Because Linus makes an effort to insult Mach, it almost makes me think that he's simply jealous of OS X.
... that things look pretty ... and that they're smooth. Everything that Linux on the desktop wants to be.
Jealous that in OS X, things just work