*BSD News Article 27403


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
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From: richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin)
Subject: Re: Could the BSD 4.4 Lite be a new beginning?
Message-ID: <CL9MHI.ECq@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: HCRC, University of Edinburgh
References: <HSU.94Feb14043905@laphroaig.cs.hut.fi> <R60q1p-.dysonj@delphi.com> <g89r4222.761250723@kudu>
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 1994 12:24:52 GMT
Lines: 21

In article <g89r4222.761250723@kudu> g89r4222@kudu.ru.ac.za (Geoff Rehmet) writes:

>(As a comparison, 386bsd0.1+patckit0.1 survived crashme for a few
>seconds !  SunOS 4.1.1 survives crashme for between 30seconds to
>just under 30 minutes!)

If I recall correctly, crashme works by executing random instructions.
It was initially used to "prove" that RISC processors were more buggy
than CISC, but the explanation turned out to be that the operating
systems on RISC machines (which have to do more interesting work
handling traps) were more buggy.

I would be interested to know the results of running crashme on a BSD
machine without a floating point processor - floating point emulation
is a fine area for bugs.

-- Richard
-- 
Richard Tobin, HCRC, Edinburgh University                 R.Tobin@ed.ac.uk

"We demand guaranteed rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty" - HHGTTG