Re: regression testing

Jonathan Morton
2001-03-22T18:14:27Z

>- automated heavy stress testing

This would be an interesting one to me, from a benchmarking POV. I'd like
to know what my hardware can really do, for one thing - it's all very well
saying this box can do X Whetstones and has a 100Mbit NIC, but it's a much
more solid thing to be able to say "my box handled the official Foobar
stress-test in Y hours, handling Z widgets per second".

The lmbench statistics are nice, but most of those numbers mean absolutely
nothing to all but übergeeks (what they say to my partially-trained ears is
that my gateway box sucks, but then again it's five-year-old Intel hardware
so that could probably have been predicted). Are there already
stress-testing kits for user-level processes I could play with?

What would be *really* interesting would be to make such tests as portable
as practical, so that at least some of them can be run on "rival platforms"
(such as *cough* Redmondware) to see if they stand up to the challenge as
well.

However, if the focus is on *kernel* stress-testing, portability might be a
little difficult to arrange for many tests. The basics could probably be
written portably or ported easily, though - things that lmbench already
(briefly) benchmarks, for example.

--------------------------------------------------------------
from: Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
mail: chromi@cyberspace.org (not for attachments)
big-mail: chromatix@penguinpowered.com
uni-mail: j.d.morton@lancaster.ac.uk

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