The Daily WTF

Upgrading to a new point release on the Linux kernel isn’t the riskiest thing you can do in your infrastructure, but it’s not completely without risk. It’s not so much that the kernel maintainers are playing fast and loose- they’re a very conservative bunch for the most part- but some application code might be making assumptions that become incorrect in the next release.

For Ramona‘s company, that happened. They updated the kernel, and immediately one of their libraries, written in C++, started segfaulting. Now, the developer behind it was still with the organization, but had climbed the ranks- he was no longer a Software Engineer, or even a Senior Software Engineer, but was now a Senior Solutions Architect and was not to be bothered with trivial things.

So without bothering the very important architect, Ramona had to pick apart the offending C++ code on her own. It was older C++,

To read the full article click on the 'post' link at the top.