> Linux 2.1 is to a great extent that stuff ready for testing. If you want
> to put a bunch of people together to write the "brutalize kernel" suite
> please do - it would be a great project for use on all OS's
A formalized testing process would be great - I'm envisioning a collection
of people with spare machines, each with slightly different configs,
downloading a kernel patch and a test suite patch, building the kernel,
rebooting, and then building and running an automated test suite for a day
or two ("make test"). The test suite might consist of a giant Perl script
coordinating a bunch of programs like crashme, lmbench, TCP/IP exercisers,
scripts to abuse various file systems and devices, and so on. It could
even include automatic reporting to a central database of some sort.
Hopefully with enough participants, a decent subset of possible kernel and
hardware configurations and features could be checked and we'd have some
data to point to for people with reliability concerns ("This kernel has
been tested on 150 different configurations for a total of 7200 hours
without crashing, enjoy.").
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