Research finds Linux has fewer bugs
Research finds Linux has fewer bugs
Dec 15, 2004: Research carried out by Coverity over the course of four years has discovered that Linux operating systems have far fewer flaws in the software than other commercial operating systems.
985 bugs were found in 5.7 million lines of code, which make up the most up to date version of the Linux kernel, compared to other commercial programs of the same kind of size, which usually have more than 5,000 flaws or defects.
The following statements were made on the Coverity website: "The majority of these bugs were found in the device drivers, which are the modules that handle communication between hardware devices (such as hard disks, monitors, and printers) and the core of the Operating System kernel.
"A significant number of bugs were also found in the file system code and networking code. Only 1% of the bugs found were in the core kernel services."
The defects detected in Linux 2.6.9 included memory leaks, out of bounds array accesses, use of freed memory, dead code, misuse of negative values, and unused return values.
The consequences of the faults were also outlined on the Coverity website: "Most of the defects detected can lead to catastrophic errors such as system crashes and memory corruption. At best, these kinds of problems inconvenience desktop users with system hangs that require a reboot.
"At worst, they can cause data loss or server downtime for mission critical applications during periods of high load."
The research also detected cases where memory could be lost to the system until a reboot occurs, which could be problematic for high availability applications.
Coverity has not analysed the Microsoft Windows source code because it has not been available to monitor. However, another research paper, made by Forrester Research found that Windows produced more secure code.
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