New LWN Articles About Kernel Space (Now Outside the Paywall)
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Troubles with triaging syzbot reports [LWN.net]
A report from the syzbot kernel fuzz-testing robot does not usually spawn a vitriolic mailing-list thread, but that is just what happened recently. While the invective is regrettable, the underlying issue is important. The dispute revolves around how best to report bugs to affected subsystems and, ultimately, how not to waste maintainers' time.
Al Viro was apparently fed up with syzbot reports that involved the ntfs3 filesystem but that were not copied (CCed) to the maintainers of ntfs3. The syzbot message was sent to the kernel mailing list, but Viro shouted his reply that "ANY BUG REPORTS INVOLVING NTFS3 IN REPRODUCER NEED TO BE CCED TO MAINTAINERS OF NTFS3". That complaint had been relayed several times in the past, he indicated, without the problem getting fixed, so he was planning to stop looking at the reports. In fact, they will be "getting triaged straight to /dev/null here".
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Bugs and fixes in the kernel history [LWN.net]
Each new kernel release fixes a lot of bugs, but each release also introduces new bugs of its own. That leads to a fundamental question: is the kernel community fixing bugs more quickly than it is adding them? The answer is less than obvious but, if it could be found, it would give an important indication of the long-term future of the kernel code base. While digging into the kernel's revision history cannot give a definitive answer to that question, it can provide some hints as to what that answer might be.
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Development statistics for the 6.1 kernel (and beyond) [LWN.net]
The 6.1 kernel was released on December 11; by the time of this release, 13,942 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline, growing the kernel by 412,000 lines of code. This is thus not the busiest development cycle ever, but neither is it the slowest, and those changesets contained a number of fundamental changes. This release will also be the long-term-support kernel for 2022. Read on for a look at where the work in 6.1 came from.
The work in 6.1 was contributed by 2,043 developers, of whom 303 made their first contribution to the kernel in this release.