Suggestion for Pentium Error Stress Testing

Billy Harvey (Thrillseeker@worldnet.att.net)
Thu, 13 Nov 1997 16:18:34 -0600 (CST)

Perhaps Richard or someone could whip up a program similar to the
bovine effort, that linux folks could extract a keyspace from and run
a sequence of bits through their system, to see if it will crash. The
code would have to write a (flushed and synced) log before and after
each execution effort so that we would have a trace to see which (if
any, but I'm sure there are probably more) bit patterns cause
problems, and on which processors.

If we spread this out over several thousand CPUs for a few weeks, we
could check a lot of codespace. Obviously, we would need to run the
program when we wouldn't mind a crash - i.e. in the wee wee hours of
the morning for most of us.

I'd rather find problems via such a trusted method than read about it
from CERT.

Comments?

Billy Harvey

J.P. Racine writes:
> Wouldn't it have been the responsable thing for Intel to have done what
> you are doing in the first place? :)
>
> Richard B. Johnson wrote:
...
> > I also
> > have a 64-bit random-number generator running on another machine
> > to check for other problems on the Pentium.
...