make -j as a stress test (was: Re: Quality of FreeBSD) [WARNING - 6.0-BETA1 still hosed!]

[Robert Watson]

On Fri, 22 Jul 2005, Danny Howard wrote:

> While I agree with Karl that introducing instability is a very bad 
> thing, I guess we now have an answer to Karl's vexation yesterday: [ 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2005-July/017210.html 
> ]
>
>     "What I don't understand Robert is why Soren's code is "too
>     sensitive" to commit, but the explosive reduction in stability
>     that the changes made between 4.x and 5.3 caused weren't
>     enough to back THAT out until it could be fixed."
>
> The answer would seem to be that when someone actually does test the 
> untested code, it is even worse than the code we are already upset with. 
> :)

I think part of the confusion here has to do with the nature of "tested 
code".  Hardware device drivers can be highly tested, but fail to work on 
specific hardware that isn't in the hands of the people developing or 
testing with.  The 6.x code is presumably running on tens of thousands if 
not hundreds of thousands of machines quite successfully under very high 
load, running this same code.  So far, since people having problems with 
the 5.x code were reminded of the patches, we've seen one post of "this 
works much better!" and one post of "this is even worse!", which should 
make clear the challenges involved, and how important it is that as many 
people as possible help in the testing process.  And that it doesn't take 
a whole lot of work to provide at least a little help in the testing -- 
Karl was able to uncover a problem by simply booting the installed system, 
which was presumably an investment of less then twenty minutes of his 
time.  I'm sure Soren would love a donation of some nice new server 
hardware if you happen to have it to spare, but getting involved in 
testing code is the next best thing :-).

Robert N M Watson