LinuxWorld: Kernel Space: Buried in Warnings

“The 2.6.19-rc4 prepatch release did not go quite as well as the
developers might have liked; some confusion over the return type
for an internal function led to an undesirable mixing of pointer
and integer types in the depths of the block layer. As it turns
out, gcc noticed this problem and duly issued warnings about it,
but nobody saw them before the mistaken patch was merged and the
resulting kernel shipped. This is, in other words, a problem which
should have been easily avoidable…”

Complete
Story