Linux is Released Too Often, Tested Insufficiently (Same as Chromium, Firefox, and Systemd)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 12, 2024,
updated May 12, 2024

Driven by schedule, not quality (objective criterion)

THE new release (6.9) of Linux is now (finally!) officially announced. Expect a follow-up release in days or weeks to come (Linux 6.9.1). Linus Torvalds already speaks of known issues^*. We keep track of media coverage about it in the sister site.

Quality control when I was a young developer meant that new software releases were rare but thoroughly tested. Before Internet connections were widespread you couldn't just dump some defective program and then update/fix it "on the go" (over the Internet). A lot of that has changed, leaving users with worse quality of programs, often shipped with many known bugs.

One motivating factor here isn't even remotely connected to innovation. It's about making any forks a lot harder to maintain (far more work involved). █

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^* The following message is only minutes old.

• Linux 6.9

  So Thorsten is still reporting a few regression fixes that haven't
  made it to me yet, but none of them look big or worrisome enough to
  delay the release for another week.  We'll have to backport them when
  they get resolved and hit upstream.
  
  
  So 6.9 is now out, and last week has looked quite stable (and the
  whole release has felt pretty normal).  Below is the shortlog for the
  last week, with the changes mostly being dominated by some driver
  updates (gpu and networking being the big ones, but "big" is still
  pretty small, and there's various other driver noise in there too).
  
  
  Outside of drivers, it's some filesystem fixes (bcachefs still stands
  out, but ksmbd shows up too), some late selftest fixes, and some core
  networking fixes.
  
  
  And I now have a more powerful arm64 machine (thanks to Ampere), so
  the last week I've been doing almost as many arm64 builds as I have
  x86-64, and that should obviously continue during the upcoming merge
  window too. The M2 laptop I have has been more of a "test builds
  weekly" rather than "continuously".
  
  
  Not that I really expect that to really show any issues - the laptop
  builds never did - but I feel happier having a bit more coverage.
  
  
  Anyway, please keep testing, and obviously this means that tomorrow
  the merge window for 6.10 opens. I already have a few dozen pull
  requests pending, I appreciate the early birds,
  
  
                    Linus