And there is the track record: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/sourc...

happymellon · 2025-01-31T09:20:44 1738315244

That looks not too bad considering what it does and the time range of CVEs

mariusor · 2025-01-31T11:55:44 1738324544

Maybe you can do a comparison to another well known open source project and see how well systemd fares: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/l...

shakna · 2025-01-31T16:02:56 1738339376

Or OpenRC, which is closer to a competitor, than an entire OS. [0]

[0] https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/o...

mariusor · 2025-01-31T18:41:47 1738348907

Of course, the scope is different, the kernel is about 30 times as large as systemd (which is less than I was expecting frankly), but they both match the description "low-level large C language project". Therefore in my mind they should have a similarl density of CVEs per lines of code:

Systemd has 4 open CvEs in ~1M lines of code.

The linux kernel hash 18 open CvEs in ~30M lines of code.