AMD Open-Source GPU Kernel Driver Above 5 Million Lines, Entire Linux Kernel At 34.8 Million ( www.phoronix.com )

goo , 10 months ago

Definitely some backdoors right in there.

justastranger , 10 months ago

It’s open source. If there were backdoors people would’ve noticed.

Imacat , 10 months ago

Open source code isn’t immune to exploits. It’s impossible to exhaustively test every interaction in massive code bases for unintended behavior.

The upside of open source is that a well intentioned person might find a vulnerability and get it fixed. Up until then it might be someone’s 0 day.

justastranger , 10 months ago

You’re talking about exploits. They were talking about backdoors. The are not the same thing.

Imacat , 10 months ago

Open source code isn’t immune to backdoors. It’s impossible to exhaustively test every interaction in massive code bases for unintended behavior.

The upside of open source is that a well intentioned person might find a backdoor and get it fixed. Up until then it might be someone’s backdoor.

Better?

tormeh , 10 months ago

Holy mackerel. This seems excessive, and there’s gotta be so much nasty stuff hidden and/or forgotten in there. Is the Intel driver as large?

Pietrasagh , 10 months ago

Acc to article Intel driver is 381k kines. Two orders of magnitude less. There might some minor inefficiencies in AMD code, but nobody will read 34 mln of lines of code so we will never know ;-)

jcarax , 10 months ago

Meanwhile the open-source NVIDIA “Nouveau” driver is around 201k (21.7k blank lines, 24.3k lines of comments, and 155k lines of code). Or the Intel i915 DRM kernel graphics driver is around 381k lines via the same cloc judgment.