It’s common for NVIDIA and AMD to tweak their drivers to optimise specific titles, but patches to operating systems just for games? Usually developers work around platform quirks, but that’s not good enough for Linus Torvalds, the man behind Linux. When crashes in The Witcher 2 were caused by Linux’s core software, Torvalds not only requested the bug be fixed, but that Steam games should be used in the future as “good tests of odd behaviour”.
The issue was reported on GitHub last month and eventually tracked down to a problem in the Linux kernel itself. While the developers of The Witcher 2 port were able to code around it, Torvalds has made it known in the past that no one should have to write workarounds for these sorts of bugs.
It’s shouldn’t come as surprise then that Torvalds weighed in on the report himself and while he didn’t personally address the bug, the coder who introduced it did. Torvalds even went as far as to suggest that games might be ideal for testing the operating system for edge cases:
And maybe this is an excuse for somebody in the x86 maintainer team to try a few games on steam. They *are* likely good tests of odd behavior..
The game crashes with kernel 3.17.7 and later [GitHub, via Softpedia]
Photo: Kyd, licensed under Creative Commons
Comments
2 responses to “Witcher 2 Bug Prompts Linux Creator To Recommend Devs Play Steam Games”
I came here expecting some totally irrational Linus rant for a laugh, but this was calm and made 100% sense.
It’s a pretty great idea, really. You wanna find bugs in your OS, odds are pretty good that games are going to spotlight them.