An article about a semctl(2) bug on DragonFly, “Make DragonFlyBSD great again!“, has popped up a few times, in comments here, some online forums, and in IRC. I’m linking to it so that I can also say: read all the way to the end and notice the date. The bug was fixed more than 6 months ago. This is not a current security problem, but a (enjoyable) description of how someone in Poland documented it.
Nobody reads anything but headlines, geez.
I was one of those people who posted this bug link.
Let me clear things up, I did read the post to the end and understand it’s been fixed for months.
My reason for my post was an overall concern I have in the quality and state of the Dragonfly code base.
This bug is alarming that it *even existed*.
It’s also alarming that recently it was found that the file system was double writing data to disk, causing endurance disk issues and performance issues.
The code just seems to be in a bad state.
This comment summarizes my feelings exactly
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13882623
Feel free to help the team audit the code.
DragonFlyBSD doesn’t have thousands of developers or quarter million dollar donations flowing in.
Help out constructively if you can.
Anonymous, if all it takes is two bug reports to make you worried about an entire operating system… don’t ever look at any bug tracker, ever. You will be horrified by every operating system forever.
pkg audit (or the equivalent for aptitude, pkgsrc, yum, etc) will double the horror.
How that Linux hdlc bug recently found that existed for a while? Guess we shouldn’t use Linux either. OpenBSD even finds bugs/holes in their base install.
I’d love to see a public bug tracker for any/all versions of Windows.
Basically, “I agree with both Roofus and Justin”.