5 ms·

given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow

• gghhvgx 9y ago
  given enough voters with half a brain, all useless comments are downvoted to oblivion
  • dom0 9y ago
    Since I have to squint my eyes to read your comment the principle you postulate seems to work.
• reeboo 9y ago
  I agree. This is a great example of Linus' Law.
• geofft 9y ago
  Sure, but it's not at all clear eyeballs are the most efficient way to find bugs. They seem remarkably inefficient compared to computers, which have generally shown themselves to be good at monotonous mechanical work that requires good attention to detail and no creativity. In particular it seems to me like this could have been fixed with a better, machine-readable description of the types/structures for each ioctl, plus a static analysis tool that makes sure that the kernel does a copy_from_user on exactly what the documented input types are and no more or less. There is already a halfhearted attempt to encode type information in ioctls (the _IOR, _IOW, etc. macros), so I think this is doable. I'm not sure how much work is required to trace copy_from/to_user statically, but it certainly seems like it would be far less work than 20 years of people using these syscalls. As another example, I think "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" would be a poor reason to eschew writing tests for your code.
  • db48x 9y ago
    The quoted soundbite is intended to be pithy, not 100% literal. It's ok if some of the eyeballs are in fact implemented with automated static analysis.
• userbinator 9y ago
  This bug was in code which very few applications would ever use, and its manifestation is quite specific, so it's no surprise that it was never discovered. I don't doubt that more of these "benign" bugs exist in other exotic pieces of code in the kernel; in light of this, perhaps the saying should be "given enough bugs, all eyeballs are shallow."
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]