Linux researcher and developer says 'there are bugs in your kernel right now that won't be found for years. I know because I analyzed 125,183 of them'
What's bug's scarier than a spider? That's right, a Linux bug š±
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Linux is a beautiful thing. From a completely open-source base, we have probably ten quintillion different distros that treat us like adults, capable of actually owning, controlling, and tinkering with our software. Including, of course, recent boons for gaming such as SteamOS, Bazzite, and Nobara. But that very same free and open foundation might also bring with it some hurdles, such as longstanding bugs.
Researcher and developer Jenny Guanni Qu recently looked at the Linux kernel's bug fixes and found tons of them stick around for a very long time. As someone who feels the allure of Linux distributions and occasionally succumbs to it before quickly scarpering back to Windows when confronted with bugsāusually small and irksome ones, but occasionally catastrophicāthis information does not help me. So if you're the same as me: you're welcome.
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Instead, if we compare the stats that actually matter and make sense, we are improving: "We're simultaneously catching new bugs faster AND slowly working through ~5,400 ancient bugs that have been hiding for over 5 years."
It's not all the same across the board, of course: some kinds of bugs are fixed faster than others. Networking bugs tend to take longer, and GPU bugs are quicker. There are also certain kinds of bugs that take much longer than others to spot and fix, but which are to be expected, for instance "race-condition" ones that are "non-deterministic and only trigger under specific timing conditions that might occur once per million executions."
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In general, the less a bug is triggered and the fewer eyes reviewing its codebase, the longer it'll take to be spotted and fixed. Burrowing in more specifically, for anyone interested, these longstanding bugs tend to involve a few causes: "reference counting errors", "missing NULL checks after dereference", "integer overflow in size calculations", and "race conditions in state machines."
