*BSD News Article 88655


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!swrinde!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!nntp.ucsb.edu!usenet
From: Axel Boldt <boldt@math.ucsb.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Measuring "stability" (was: Linux vs BSD)
Date: 08 Feb 1997 14:44:05 -0800
Organization: Univ of California at Santa Barbara, Dept of Mathematics
Lines: 35
Sender: boldt@fermat
Message-ID: <ywtn2te3olm.fsf@math.ucsb.edu>
References: <32DFFEAB.7704@usa.net> <slrn5fejrn.353.bet@onyx.interactive.net>
	<5d7spf$8n6@web.nmti.com> <5d9p55$t1h@news.ox.ac.uk>
	<5dadfr$cnu@web.nmti.com> <ywtu3nq7oyq.fsf_-_@math.ucsb.edu>
	<32F93870.167EB0E7@freebsd.org>
NNTP-Posting-Host: fermat.math.ucsb.edu
X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.3/Emacs 19.34
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.misc:156883 comp.os.linux.advocacy:82844 comp.unix.bsd.misc:2373


I think crashme is a good start for testing stability, the only
problem being that it does not test the networking code and the
filesystems. Does a similar tool exist that rapidly sends garbage to
random ports? Should be trivial to write in any case.

We could then have a stability test that works something like this:

- two crashmes running in parallel

- repeatedly tar and untar a big directory (dir should not be
  writeable by the user running crashme)

- one outside random network attacker

- one httpd constantly being queried for a big doc (again, not
  writeable by crashme user).

Clearly, we would have to specify which versions to test
(I vote for the "stable" releases: Linux 2.0.x and FreeBSD 2.1, soon
2.2), which distributions (void in the case of FreeBSD, for Linux
I would recommend Debian), and which network services to run
(ftp,email,http,telnet,ping?) 

Since all of this depends heavily on hardware and network speed, the
only thing that would make sense is to run the test twice on the same
machine, switching OS's in between. Also, the test would have to be
repeated several times because of the randomness involved.

What do people think?

Axel

-- 
 Axel Boldt  *  boldt@math.ucsb.edu  *  http://www.math.ucsb.edu/%7Eboldt/