anyone else feel like the linux kernel release quality has come down a bit here in the 2020s? i feel like it hasn't been this bad since the mid 90s. anecdotally in the past couple years, i've experienced a data corruption bug in xfs, wonky wifi firmware/kernel regressions, graphics artifacts and hard crashes in amdgpu. my experience with mainline releases before 2020 has been that they're rock solid. i'd doubt myself before i doubted the kernel. i say all this with a deep appreciation for everyone and the work they're doing... my intuition says that the complexity of it all is reaching a tipping point that is finally overwhelming the ages old release engineering processes.
A Higgs-Bugson in the Linux Kernel
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: A Higgs-Bugson in the Linux Kernel
#32Curious why they're using NFSv3 instead of v4?
Re: A Higgs-Bugson in the Linux Kernel
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> works so well a bug showed up in the kernel :-) What exactly are you trying to highlight here? Most code has bugs. This one is someone forgetting to stick to actual behavior described in 1997, it's a mistake, mistakes happen. Which one of "secure", "simple", "battle tested" and "no crazy architecture" do you think this disproves? Or do you think CIFS or Ceph have no bugs?
I think they're saying typically the kernel one of the last places you'd expect the bug, so it shows that it is battle tested? I don't think they're being snarky.
I didn't really read it as snarky, I just straight up don't understand what they mean (and maybe why that smiley is there?)
Re: A Higgs-Bugson in the Linux Kernel
#34> A higgs-bugson is a bug that is reported in practice but difficult to reproduce This was the first time I heard of "higgs-bugson". The term sounded so forced that I had to know how it differed from Heisenbug. In short, it doesn't[1]. Then why did it even exist? The term somehow made it to the "Heisenbug"'s Wikipedia page[1], so I checked the sources. There were two and both end up at the same site: Jeff Atwood's bl…
Like they say, "Stop trying to make fetch happen!"
Re: A Higgs-Bugson in the Linux Kernel
#35Calling this a "Higgs-Bugson" doesn't make a lot of sense. There's nothing uncertain or difficult to reproduce about the Higgs. The reason that it took so long to find was that the cross-section of production is very low, the decay signatures are hard to separate from the background, the specific energy scale it existed at was not well-defined, and building the LHC was (to put it mildly) difficult and expensive. Roug…
A bug that shows up in production but goes away when you try to debug it is usually called a Heisenbug.
Re: A Higgs-Bugson in the Linux Kernel
#36Kerberos is 'fun'. I had to manage a system which used Kerberos
to provide authentication between a Rubik's cube of various Windows flavours with various crypto standards, Linux machines of various versions and Java versions and apps of various maturity. It was an ever present source of weird behaviour and I had to bury myself in the innards of all these systems.
I know, not directly related to the article. Just needed to vent bitterly.
Re: A Higgs-Bugson in the Linux Kernel
#37I always thought this was rather called a 'Heisenbug'?
Re: A Higgs-Bugson in the Linux Kernel
#38NFS is usually only used in mixed linux/windows environments. The easiest fix is to avoid NFS and esp. Windows. NFS alone is nightmare enough, Windows is just insanity.
Re: A Higgs-Bugson in the Linux Kernel
#39I always thought this was rather called a 'Heisenbug'?
I think the distinction the author is making is that:
- a Heisenbug is stochastic and potentially non-local, but
- a Higgs-Bugson is a bug that is known to exist (in prod) but is extremely hard to observe in the lab (during dev/testing).
I can see it being a useful distinction. A bug that I can't even reproduce at all sits in a different ring of hell from, say, a memory corruption bug that makes the program crash on random unrelated lines of code.
Re: A Higgs-Bugson in the Linux Kernel
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they're saying typically the kernel one of the last places you'd expect the bug, so it shows that it is battle tested? I don't think they're being snarky.
I didn't really read it as snarky, I just straight up don't understand what they mean (and maybe why that smiley is there?)
By "no crazy architecture" I meant it avoids the modern trend of building monstrous data platforms on top of data meshes, event buses, and layers of cloud abstractions. The kind I sometimes see, hence the smiley :-)