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A Flood of Stable Linux Kernels Released

Posted by timothy on from the five-is-better-than-one dept.

Julie188 writes "Greg Kroah-Hartman has released five new stable Linux kernels, correcting minor errors of their predecessors and including improvements which are unlikely to generate new errors. As so often with kernel versions in the stable series, it remains undisclosed if the new versions contain changes which fix security vulnerabilities, although the number of changes and some of the descriptions of those changes certainly suggest that all the new versions contain security fixes."

1 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. If this were Windows by erroneus · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Okay HERE is what I will begin citing about what is wrong with the culture of Windows programming.

    I am not going to claim that in every case, any given program compiled to run on Linux will not break because of a "fix" to the kernel, but I will say that it is very uncommon and very unusual for this to happen.

    Thanks to the Windows source code leak years ago, we now know for certain that "bugward compatibility" is built into the Windows OS and its kernel. In case you can't guess what "bugward compatibility" is, it would be the support of programs that had been utilizing undocumented system calls utilizing system calls in unconventional ways to achieve their ends. DOS, and Windows by extension, programmers have been doing this since the beginning. It is such a problem now that when Microsoft wants to fix a problem in their OS, they also have to write code for "bugward compatibility" to prevent other software from breaking in the process.

    This is a cultural problem to be sure. If DOS and Windows programmers routinely followed the rules (and I am sure most do, don't think I am painting ALL DOS/Windows programming with that brush) Microsoft wouldn't have to worry about issuing bug fixes so much so long as their API remains true to the documented specs. This is a pretty sharp contrast with Linux programming where such stunts as using the OS in unconventional was is at the very least severely frowned upon... and when a kernel update does break a program, the programs are expected to get updated and not the other way around which makes sense. Microsoft went down the wrong path long, long ago and has been paying for it ever since.