Re: Better testing of hardware (was: Defective Read Hat)

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

"Stephen Gutknecht (linux-kernel)" <linux-kernel@i405.com> writes:

> A Linux Kernel compile test does a really good job of testing the hard disk,
> RAM, and CPU... as it executes all types of instructions and the final
> output depends on all prior steps completing correctly.  On a really fast
> system (> 900Mhz) might make sense to run it twice, once to "warm up" the
> CPU and other components.  Most "benchmarks" just test speed, not the actual
> stability or data integrity (they write results to a device but don't check
> for data corruption, or they test only one device at a time, not all at
> once).

Also note that a Linux Kernel compile stresses memory because
of the very pointer loaded data structures of gcc.  This means that
memory corruption is most likely to flip a bit in a pointer, and cause
a bad pointer.

Eric
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