From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1766010AbYEBR1g (ORCPT ); Fri, 2 May 2008 13:27:36 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1764309AbYEBR10 (ORCPT ); Fri, 2 May 2008 13:27:26 -0400 Received: from smtp-out04.alice-dsl.net ([88.44.63.6]:4635 "EHLO smtp-out04.alice-dsl.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752485AbYEBR10 (ORCPT ); Fri, 2 May 2008 13:27:26 -0400 To: Daniel Hazelton Cc: "Parag Warudkar" , "Adrian Bunk" , LKML Subject: Re: How to reduce the number of open kernel bugs From: Andi Kleen References: <82e4877d0805020742l7d4a6ec9mc72e79aa3d242348@mail.gmail.com> <200805021229.47038.dhazelton@enter.net> Date: Fri, 02 May 2008 19:27:04 +0200 In-Reply-To: <200805021229.47038.dhazelton@enter.net> (Daniel Hazelton's message of "Fri, 2 May 2008 12:29:46 -0400") Message-ID: <87od7ovcpj.fsf@basil.nowhere.org> User-Agent: Gnus/5.1008 (Gnus v5.10.8) Emacs/21.3 (gnu/linux) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-OriginalArrivalTime: 02 May 2008 17:20:09.0878 (UTC) FILETIME=[C60BE360:01C8AC78] Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Daniel Hazelton writes: > If the hardware works > perfectly in every other OS It depends. There used to be the famous case (not longer true now) that older Linux allocated memory from the top of the memory down and other OS generally allocated it the from bottom to up and when some of your top memory was broken Linux would often hit problems where other OS did not. Also there can be the case when some OS use hardware quite differently or different hardware features than other. Standard case for example used to be that there were a few platforms where the SMM code had 64bit bugs and of course you would only hit them when running a 64bit OS which was Linux. A modern OS is a very complicated system with tens of millions of code lines and you can't assume they all program the hardware in the same way. Simple truths are often wrong. - and possibly even previous versions of Linux - Now that is a more interesting case. But regressions are always taken seriously by all maintainers I know. -Andi