User:Sam/Memorable bugs I like to reference

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I often want to refer to bugs which are notable in some way (wild UB cases, bizarre in some way, or related to a certain topic). Here's a rolling list of them.

Bugs found by Portage's native file copying

Portage has a C extension (src/portage_util_file_copy_reflink_linux.c) controlled by native-extensions to use copy-on-write (CoW) if possible when merging files from the image directory to the live filesystem.

It has a history of finding bugs in kernels and filesystems because of how extensively the CoW syscalls get stresstested when doing many thousands of merges a day collectively if you consider the number of users on various filesystems in Gentoo.

Notable bugs found by arch testing

Many of the bugs in this list could've affected any platform or architecture, and it just happened to work in other places. The idea is to try demonstrate the value of portability and testing on various systems in Gentoo.

(Of course, things which fail on niche architectures/platforms often violate some generic C rule or other, but many of the things listed here for are definitely and unambiguously broken on e.g. amd64 and it's just lucky nobody else hit it first.

Think e.g. "a crash happens on arm by chance, but it can easily happen on amd64 with X input, and it revealed missing bounds checks." or similar.)

Being proactive

We often end up finding bugs by testing new software before it's released. Sometimes we end up finding things which other distros (who have already done a mass rebuild for the new release) have missed, too.

  • GCC 13

General bugs

List of general bugs we've found through testing but just in the wild rather than when specifically testing a pre-release.

TODO

External links