*BSD News Article 79971


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From: John Dyson <dyson@freebsd.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD and Linux
Date: Sat, 05 Oct 1996 08:48:03 -0500
Organization: John S. Dyson's home machine
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Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

> 
> I can't really speak for the hardware, but the software is not all that
> fault-tolerant, actually, and crashing both machines was a rather sadly
> easy task, even when we weren't really half trying.
>
Or worse, I was supporting (from the OS side) the FT's running SVR4.  It
would be funny if it wasn't so serious.  Yep, the hardware and drivers
were pretty impressive (from the standpoint of being able to yank out
a running processor and replace it -- no hiccup.)  Just run a standard
run-of the mill program (and run out of swap space.)  It is JUST as
ugly as non tolerant systems.  Start paging at all, then it is really
bad also.  You *can* make the FT systems really FT, but it requires
craftmanship on the part of the application developers understanding
the machine before the advantages are realized.

I think that the FT's are able to be fault-tolerant, but not in the
sense of being so fault tolerant that applications can not cause the
system to do "bad things."

John