Bad Lockup Bug Plagues Linux

jones_supa (887896) writes "A hard to track system lockup bug seems to have appeared in the span of couple of most recent Linux kernel releases. Dave Jones of Red Hat was the one to first report his experience of frequent lockups with 3.18. Later he found out that the issue is present in 3.17 too. The problem was first suspected to be related to Xen. A patch dating back to 2005 was pushed for Xen to fix a vmalloc_fault() path that was similar to what was reported by Dave. The patch had a comment that read "the line below does not always work. Needs investigating!" But it looks like this issue was never properly investigated. Due to the nature of the bug and its difficulty in tracking down, testers might be finding multiple but similar bugs within the kernel. Linus even suggested taking a look in the watchdog code. He also concluded the Xen bug to be a different issue. The bug hunt continues in the Linux Kernel Mailing List."

Comments

Re:But guys...

[multisync]

I thought open source software was supposed to be better because everyone could see the code and spot problems.

It is, they can and do.

Re:But guys...

[itzly]

That's why having a bug is worthy of a news item.

Re:But guys...

[itzly]

This is not unique to open source software. Closed source code also is complex, and lacks developers. Bugs that aren't reported by big customers are easily ignored.

Re:What's happening to Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux support in a nutshell: blame the user.

Re:Come on Slashdot, get your news current

[bill_mcgonigle]

A Microsoft bug, proof of the incompetence of closed source.
A Linux bug. Either point to some closed source factor, or claim its solving a victory in the flexibility of open source.

So much this. I know every time I report a bug to Microsoft, I have a fix from the lead Windows architect in under three weeks. I don't understand what these linux wankers are on about.