Linux Stability & cold.system
Benjamin Redelings I (bredelin@sdcc6.ucsd.edu)
Sun, 16 Nov 1997 23:10:48 -0800
Hi, I read cold.system a lot, and we've recently finished a minor flame
war about some really worthless stuff. It wasn't even "should there
have been a 2.0.30", but merely people insulting the developers when the
"upgrade" to 2.0.30 didn't work as good as 2.0.29. This was mainly
because they didn't understand how Linux development works, but also
because they they that the "stable" releases were somehow guaranteed to
be stable.
How do YOU check on the stability of a release? I read the
linux-kernel archives, and I used to (and hopefully will again) look at
the unnofficial patch list on linuxhq. However, lots of newbies don't
know that.
So, some people (myself included) have put forth some ideas on some way
of actually MEASURING the stability of kernels. One of my favorite was
one somebody else mentioned: have a utility kind of like the 'make
check' things that come with bash that tests the kernel currently
running for stability, memory leaks, etc. I know people have
"kernel-killers" out there :) If some standard test suite were
available, then everyone could upload their results. However, although
we can test much of the kernel pretty well, we might have some
difficulty testing wierd components. I suppose we could try to get each
developer to write a stress-tester for his/her subsystem.
Has anyone (LMP perhaps?) started this already? Will this work?
Thanks for the info.
-BenRI