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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."
I thought open source software was supposed to be better because everyone could see the code and spot problems.
Too often when I find a bug (even investigate the actual reason as well as I can) and talk about it in a mailing list or bug tracker, it's just crickets chirping. No one stands up and properly takes responsibility of the issue. I very well understand that this might be due to lacking developer resources, but it still results in bad software.
I have started wondering if modern software is simply too complex to be developed in high quality with the resources (manpower and funding) that open source gets.
It's pretty simple. If you are not a programmer, and being able to script your OS is not important to you, find some other OS. Linux is not used because it's free, it's used because you can pound it into whatever shape you want.
Talking about "quality going downhill" is meaningless drivel. File a bug or fix it yourself. I think you would be perfectly happy with a Mac. Some people manage to use Linux without issues, but the key part about having a successful Linux experience is to get your hands dirty when you do have issues, instead of running away to some other distro or OS.
You have made some bad distro choices. I don't know what convinced you that Fedora, the ne plus ultra of bleeding-edge distros, would be a stable experience. You allude to issues with Mint, I am skeptical. I am even more skeptical of a Debian update installing systemd. Unless you're running Jessie (i.e. Debian unstable) systemd will not be the default init system, and it's extremely unlikely that you would notice that it was running unless you decided to start using systemctl on the command line. If you were running Jessie, news flash: it is unstable. Yes, it has been stable enough to be usable for a long time. Clearly there is a difference between "stable" and "mostly stable".
Really what it sounds like you did was to install stable and then add the Jessie sources. It's understandable; stable has really old versions of almost anything, and apt-pinning should theoretically keep things under control. In practice, I have found this to be the shortest path to needing a complete reinstall.
Your biggest single problem is blaming the software when the problem is between your keyboard and your chair. If you're going to do dumb things, accept some responsibility for fixing your mistakes. However, it does sound like you will be most happy in Mac-land. Linux will not miss you.
In my experience, closed source software comes with much less bugs to begin with. With OSS, even some essential features can be glitchy or partially implemented.
While I'd agree that much open source software is just hacked together and shipped when it does everything the developers care about, most of the bugs in our software (not open source per se, but our customers get all our source so they can modify it if they want) are caused by third-party, closed-source libraries that we use because licensing them was much cheaper than writing the same code from scratch. I haven't seen a single crash in a year that wasn't due to third party, closed source code.
And, financially, it still makes sense, because developing workarounds for their bugs is still cheaper than writing the code from scratch.