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SubjectRe: Kernel Crash Tests
Alan Cox wrote:
>
> > Are there any standard way to test the kernel? Did Linus and Alan release
> > their procedures? It should be nice if more people were in charge of
> > testing the kernel. I'm sorry if this is already the scenario...
>
> Lots of people have discussed it, nobody has actually started collecting tests
> and appointed themselves 'official destruction test team'. Thats a worthwhile
> project if you like destroying things for fun
>
> The best way to test it though is of course to use it
>
You can not prove the system to be bug free, you can just find
the counter-evidence by finding a bug... (freely using Sir Karl
Popper's theory of "Falsification"... :-)

So I did some stress-testing for the 2.0.34 pre-releases, using
a standardized procedure of running several user-land programs.
These programs include tests for network, file-i/o, process-
creation, kernel error-handling (the famous "crashme") and so
on.

This is a more practical approach, the procedure is _not_ a
complete test-suite ("complete" in a more scientific sense),
but using these tests I found some minor glitches in the kernel
and also the most recent K6 bug...

Maybe we can use it as a starting point: we could add some more
tests for different kernel-subsystems, create some automatic run-
and evaluation-scripts, ...

We should _not_ under-estimate this effort, creating a good
test-suite will become very much work quite fast!

I'm wondering what distribution maintainers like Red Hat,
Caldera, SuSe, the Debian team and so on are using to test
their systems before releasing it to the public?

- andreas

--
Andreas Haumer | email: andreas@xss.co.at | PGP key available
*x Software + Systeme | phone: +43.1.6001508 | on request.
Buchengasse 67/8 | +43.664.3004449 |
A-1100 Vienna, Austria | fax: +43.1.6001507 |

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