*BSD News Article 88698


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From: Axel Boldt <boldt@math.ucsb.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.misc
Subject: Measuring "stability" (was: Linux vs BSD)
Date: 05 Feb 1997 16:33:33 -0800
Organization: Univ of California at Santa Barbara, Dept of Mathematics
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peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:

[FreeBSD is more "stable", "reliable", "solid" than Linux]

I have some problems with these terms since we all seem to agree that
neither Linux nor FreeBSD ever crashes in everyday usage.  So why
don't we try to come up with some test that both camps can agree on
as a measure of stability?

> I'm a bad pet-owner when it comes to operating systems. I abuse them. I
> make them run two concurrent X servers (on different VCs) with Netscape
> and Xkobo and other horrid programs bashing away all at the same time.
> And that's on a fairly 486 with 16M running 3 mailing lists, 3 MUDs, and
> a website. I've got gobs of swap, but I'll run it out of that, and come
> home to see that it's been running out of swap on and off all day.

The above looks like a good start.  Should be a little bit more
formalized though. I saw a test of Unix utilities a while back, where
they threw random input at them, and the GNU tools came out as the
most stable, far ahead of comercial Unices (does FreeBSD use the GNU
tools at all?). Maybe we can do something similar for OS's. Surely,
both systems will improve as a result.

Axel

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