Is Linux Getting Buggier? Is This Honesty in the IT Market?

Published: May 15, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Here's a conversation you will never see about a Windows or Unix server platform--certainly not one being openly discussed by the responsible parties. Andrew Morton, the lead maintainer for the Linux kernel, was quoted at the LinuxTag conference in Germany two weeks ago saying that "the 2.6 kernel is slowly getting buggier. It seems we're adding bugs at a higher rate than we're fixing them."

Don't get nervous. Morton, who is the right-hand man to Linus Torvalds himself in steering Linux, wasn't divulging the results of an intensive analysis of bugs in the Linux kernel, but rather speaking anecdotally based on how many new features come flying at him for Linux and how frequently bugs need to be fixed. Morton also said in his comments at LinuxTag that it seemed to him that one of the big problems is that new features were not being coded to work on old hardware and that Linux coders were less interested in fixing known bugs than working on new code.

After everyone picked up on the story and what Morton's comments might mean in terms of the way Linux is being developed and how that might change in the future, Torvalds made it clear on the Linux.com site that he thought people were blowing the story way out of proportion, but admitted that the Linux community "had a distinct lack of a 'breather'" in the development cycle. He said the current Linux 2.6.16 kernel might end up being that breather, as it gets hardened for commercial use this year, or, if that doesn't fix the problem, he may do a code freeze for Linux 2.6.18 or some other future release.

While this whole Linux bug issue was a tempest in a teapot, the reassuring thing is that real human beings who really care about the state of the Linux code--not about some arbitrary launch date or their stock options--are in charge of what does and does not go into Linux. I don't know about you, but I find this reassuring.