> On Thu, 10 Apr 1997, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> > 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.").
FWIW, this is a great idea, and I'll help (not volunteer to
coordinate, but help) write this thing if there is an interest ... The
one caveat I see is that we should create a test suite that will run in
approx. 6 hours. I would be (and I think so would others) willing to run
this thing on my office machine, if I can set it going when I leave in the
evening and have my machine back when I come in the next morning ...
-Seth