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Linux’s second-in-commander after Linus Torvalds, Morton made the suggestion during a speech at the LinuxTag conference in Germany, according to reports from the event. He was reported as stating that he believed the Linux 2.6 kernel is “slowly getting buggier” and that if he could prove it, he would call a halt to the development process to fix bugs.

Morton had suggested that the problem was due to developers not being interested in fixing existing bugs and those affecting older hardware and peripherals.

Torvalds himself has played down the rampant speculation that followed on message boards across the Internet, however. Responding to questions from Linux.com, he said reports about the situation were “sensationalistic” but admitted there may be a problem.

“The worry is certainly real. We've had a distinct lack of a ‘breather’ when it comes to development lately,” Torvalds told the Linux resource site, although he added that the interests of commercial vendors often forced a pause for thought.

“It may end up that 2.6.16 becomes that breather, simply because a lot of the commercial folks seem to end up using that as the base, and they'll be hunkering down to stabilize that.,” Torvalds wrote. “Otherwise, we may end up just saying, ‘OK, no new features for 2.6.18’ or something, and forcing people to calm down a bit.”

A delay to the Linux development process would be reminiscent of Microsoft Corp’s Trustworthy Computing initiative, which saw the company halt development in 2002 as more than 6,000 people checking the entire Windows code base for bugs and potential security holes.