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Coverity found 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code

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CIOL Bureau
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NEW DELHI: According to a research conducted by San Francisco based code-analysis firm Coverity, the new version of Linux has far less bugs as compared to the commercial version of the open source operating system. Said an online report.

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Coverity is a code-analysis firm started by five Stanford researchers who initiated the examination in 2000 as a part of the school's Computer Science Research Center.

According to an estimate by Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Sustainable Computing Consortium for commercial software on an average there are 20 to 30 bugs per thousand lines of code. Coverity however, discovered 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code in Linux version 2.6.9 working out to meager 0.17 bugs per thousand lines of code. The discovered bugs could lead to a system crash or corrupt system memory. One hundred flaws were found in core kernel services but majority of the flaws was found in device drivers.

This is what Seth Hallem, chief executive officer of Coverity had to say, "Our findings show that Linux contains an extremely low defect rate, and is evidence of the strong security of Linux."

Linux developers have appreciated Coverity's effort and said that this report will help them deliver a more secure and stable Linux.

A brief listing of bugs is available on Coverity site. The research firm has promised to continue their work in this field and make the results available to the Linux community at no cost.



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