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Putting Linux Reliability to the Test
Frank writes "This paper documents the test results and analysis of the Linux kernel and other core OS components, including everything from libraries and device drivers to file systems and networking, all under some fairly adverse conditions, and over lengthy durations. The IBM Linux Technology Center has just finished this comprehensive testing over a period of more than three months and shares the results of their LTP (Linux Test Project) testing."
Just put a link to each box on /. and wait 24 hours.
Of course, we all knew this in our hearts, nice to see it in writing.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
Anyone know if the test will be repeated with kernel 2.6.x?
You want to put any OS to the ultimate test, you should run cheap generic hardware. I swear it's an industry conspiracy that generic parts struggle a boat load. If your parts don't come from the big boys (DELL, gateway, etc), you are likely going to see issues down the line.
Get some ECS motherboard, generic RAM... bang. You're in for the evening.
> You're thinking Microsoft Works.
I'm thinking it doesn't.
Why do you trust IBM's Linux Technology Center to evaluate Linux?
I seem to recall getting random crashes with cheapo memory, and it was a pain to track down the offending component. Of course, one would assume that IBM wouldn't go for cheapo components, but still: how does one point the finger at the software, instead of hardware? Is it just repeatability?
This is nice to hear, but it would be even more valuable if the same tests were performed on a variety of operating systems in order to compare the results.
Brian
My Company
The Linux kernel and other core OS components -- including libraries, device drivers, file systems, networking, IPC, and memory management -- operated consistently and completed all the expected durations of runs with zero critical system failures. Every run generated a high success rate (over 95%), with a very small number of expected intermittent failures that were the result of the concurrent executions of tests that are designed to overload resources. How does that compare with other OS's?
This is based on a quick scan of the paper.
Because this test appears to be a fully documented test. It doesn't appear to be a test rigged to make one platform look better than the other.
Why shoudn't we trust this test?
Because what would they have to gain by lying? The true power of opensource is that when someone does point out the weaknesses, they are fixed quickly. IBM knows that if they tell the opensource world "Hey, LINUX is pretty good but it kinda struggles in the (foo) area." that the opensource community will redouble their efforts to fix that. Microsoft is only trying to say "Windows rules, Linux sux. See, this evaluation we did proves it. Buy windows"
Second off, If this were M$ testing 2k3 and publishing the paper, everyone here would be crying foul. But because its, "Linux" it must be 100% unbais and true.
I've been using Linux for 8 years now including under high stress enviroments, 3d graphics rendering mainly, and from experiance I have see very good things from Linux. We have had software glitches before, but the core software maybe has caused 3 - 5% of our downtime. Over 70% of our downtime involves human error and about 25% of failures are due to hardware giving out.
Still what my customers are wanting to see isn't benchmarks as "So easy Grandma could use it" in Linux. While the people in the datacenters want to know how well Linux will bear under a load, most end-users and SMB's don't need to worry about it, they just need something easy to use that works.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
2.6.0 has only been out for a week. I'm going to want to see someone stress test it for a hell of a lot longer than a week before I call it "enterprise ready".
The people performing it have a vested financial interest in having it turn out a specific way, notably positive. If the test resulted showed poor reliability, then I would understand trusting it because it would go against the motives of the people performing it. Since the test affirms their business model, no matter how documented it is, it should be suspect.
It doesn't appear to be a test rigged to make one platform look better than the other.
It looks a bit skewed to me. Many of the test results depend on the computer systems meeting expectations of the people testing it, particularly in overload cases. Since the people who tested work in the Linux Technology Center, their expectations stand a greater likelyhood of being consistant with the system.
Take C/C++ and Java. Someone who regularly works with C/C++ knows certain libraries (notably the character ones) return ints for status in the form 0 being false and not 0 being true. If someone expects that, the system meets expectations and passes. If someone comes from a different background, say Java, he or she may not expect that, and the system would consequently fail the test of meeting expectations. I would like an evaluation from somewhere in-between, not someone whose years of experience allow them to gloss over what might be problems for another person.
Microsoft commonly hires outside companies to perform their tests. Do you remember the evaluation of Exchange versus Notes/Domino scalability by Ziff-Davis but funded by Microsoft? People justifiably questioned those results, as the company hired (Ziff-Davis) has an interest in pleasing the hiring company (Microsoft) so they get future work.
They have much to gain: more corporate customers and more respect and funding by greater IBM. Just because IBM supports Linux doesn't mean its motives are pure (not financially driven). Another reason for bias is the division also stood to have huge setbacks if the tests were unfavorable. How could they justify expansion and better funding if their previous statements about Linux being enterprise-ready were unfounded?
I am pretty sure that kernel 2.6 can't be considered "enterprise ready", for one, it hasn't gone through that level of testing.
Don't knock "yesterday's news". Far be it from some geeks to understand this, but there are times that "tried and true" is more important than having the latest and greatest. This testing started well before 2.6.0 was released! They can probably get started wit 2.6 as soon as an enterprise Linux distribution incorporates it.
I used to use RH8.0 and then RH9.0 and moved on to SUSE 9.0 Pro recently. I noticed that when apps crash RH distros took it much better- You could close the unstable application safely and continue working on the rest. Suse OTOH freezes. Did anyone else notice this ?
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
- because the test methodologies are documented
- because it's disclosed up-front that it's IBM Linux Team testing Linux (ie no hidden conflict of interest
As opposed to the usual (ie in the Microsoft World)Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
The full hardware/software details of the test are there. If you don't trust it, you have the ability to rerun the tests yourself.
So, ya reply to one point but ignore the rest? I think his (ultimate) point is valid. If the test was rigged, the folks involved with developing the kernel would catch on and take IBM to task for fudging the results. No, I'm not talking about the Slashdot/Fark crowd. I'm talking about REAL developers.
Also, Linux has weathered some unfavorable (and honost!) critiques before. Linus Torvalds said it best when he said (and I paraphrase since I am too lazy ATM to look up the actual quote) that it doesn't matter if there's negative publicity in the press about Linux. It just meant he got his bug reports from the Wall Street Journal as opposed to the regular kernel mailng list.
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
95% success ratio... does that mean that 1 in 20 programs I run segfaults or what? What do they mean by "failure"? Not finishing given task in predefined time? Getting the results wrong? Hanging?
Sorry but that means nothing. Even if there -was- a comparison to other systems, it would still mean nothing. 95% success ratio, 78% happiness factor and 93% user satisfaction.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Do a SuSE FTP install of SuSE 9.0.
s use_linux /
It's as close as it's going to get to a SLES release, and it's free. Suse has to many obligations to support propriatory software to make SLES free to download.
link:
http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/
Also you can get a AMD64 bit version from download now, too.
I think IBM used SuSE instead of Redhat because IBM Global Services and SuSE have been partners for almost two years.
Maybe you should stop hmmmmm'ing about these great mysteries and start googling.
Beware blue cats moving at
I think the rest of your post is either biased (assuming IBM only intends this article for a technical audience that won't use it for business decisions) or inflammatory (the comments on Microsoft that mostly have root in the attitude on Slashdot more than Microsoft's actual statements).
I need something more empirical than this assertion. I don't see kernel developers spending weeks duplicating IBM's results just to verify that Linux is as good as IBM says.
Also, Linux has weathered some unfavorable (and honost! [sic]) critiques before
This says nothing about IBM's motives. That's like saying the airlines have no ulterior motive in claiming safety because they've whethered problems in the past.
Why do you trust IBM's Linux Technology Center to evaluate Linux?
Because it is to IBM's advantage to find any weakness AND FIX IT before their customers run into the same problems. Any "insider knowledge" would be used to make the tests harder rather than easier. If it were "IBM Linux" rather that "SuSE Linux" that was being tested you'd have at least a chance of making a point.
The people performing it have a vested financial interest in having it turn out a specific way, notably positive. If the test resulted showed poor reliability, then I would understand trusting it because it would go against the motives of the people performing it.
... specifically because of this.
That may be human instinct, but let's be honest: it's not fair either. Either trust the source of information or don't, but don't trust the result of a test based on the result of the test -- circular dependency.
It's much simpler to simply say that this is a linux test by IBM, and may therefore be tainted. Did I mention that it's good to have truly independent testing centers, albeit expensive for them? This whole independent/free media thing is rather important
Hardware fails in random patterns (bits flipped by beta radiation, for example), software fails the same way in controlled instances (the same flawed logic fails the same way each time).
So when you run a test 5 times, and you get 5 results, the hardware is broken. When you run the same test 5 times, and it gets to the exact same point before sig11ing, you have a software flaw.
This is also why you do multiple tests to ensure you're getting an accurate picture of what's going on (flawed or not).
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
IBM only want's to sell it's hardware, I don't think they could care much less about the OS (remember OS/2). As long as they can ride on the back of a free labor force they are happy campers.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that IBM had told its managers to plan on moving as many as 4,730 high-tech jobs from the United States, (I wonder if they are the Linux testers)
Some of whom will be required to train the foreign workers who will replace them.
Thank's IBM. You will be remembered. I'm happy I have nothing to do with them.
I think it's more human than that. If a company or group releases results completely against their interests, integrity is the only reason such a group would go forward. Why would anyone skew results to spite themselves?
This test would have been more interesting if there had been failures. Perhaps they could have tried the test on an older version of Linux, or a different operating system.
I have been trying to write some tests of my own recently. So far I have found a filesystem OOPs, a ptrace BUG(), and my system locks up on low memory situations. Probably the lockup is because my ethernet driver allocates memory in the interrupt handler (GFP_ATOMIC) and can't handle the result when there is no memory available.
I need to fix the lock up first of all so the other tests have time to run...
I think the moderators can decide for themselves what they find good or bad. :)
Thank you though for assuming you know how everyone else in the world feels
Or, perhaps because SUSE is qualified as a distro to run on p-series hardware and RedHat (until the recently release RHEL 3.0) is not? Jesus, do some fscking research.
andy
Think the IGS SuSE partnership had anything to do with SuSE being the only qualified distro to run on p-series hardware? Ow, I think I just ate some bait.
Beware blue cats moving at
specifically because you'll now trust their future results?
"wow, last year, they had to admit their product just wasn't up to the task. but now, dang, look at 'em go!"
yes, it's quite human indeed. you don't know what all they're up to -- what seems to be self-defeating isn't always. and sometimes, well, you honestly find out that you're doing the job you had hoped you were doing, trouncing the competition. go figure: you might actually manage to not suck! but you don't get to tell anyone? and your only solution is to pay someone else to announce it? oh, wait, that's not allowed either!
any publicity is good publicity. if you can't get good publicity by announcing your product is good, just say it isn't. close enough. it's not like anyone pays attention anyway.
Before you roll something out into production, you hammer on it for a while. The crappy parts will fail or generate errors and you can have them replaced.
In my experience, most of the no-moving-parts hardware will fail within the first week, or last for years and years.
The stuff with moving parts will eventually fail. But that's harder to predict.
The problem is that the moderators act and assume as if their opinions ARE how the rest of the world feels.
That is the problem inherit in the mob moderation that Slashdot has
for one thing, it would be difficult to run a 3 month stress test on 2.6.0 when 2.6.0 isn't 3 months old, and isn't part of a released enterprise product. If they stress tested one of the betas and it failed, Microsoft would use it for advertising. :)
Maybe because IBM has a few billion invested in Linux since y2k, and a pending lawsuit? Do you think thry would just gamble on that let alone publish the results?
C|N>K
But highly unlikely. Plus, with the opensource software, you can always change the controlled variables to encourage the true problem to reveal itself.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
A bad CRC on a really-big gzip file isn't a very granular test. A good way of stressing a system so that it will show you wether it fails reproducibly is to compile a couple different versions of the Linux kernel, and see it if fails in the same spot (or at all). If you ran memtest on it, it'd likely have shown an error. Whenever you aren't sure, run memtest :)
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
oh, yeah---and statistics. Statistics are the most manipulatable facts. When given with no context, they might as well be lies.
FTA
The tests demonstrate that the Linux system is reliable and stable over long durations and can provide a robust, enterprise-level environment.
Ok, now i dont mean to troll here, so mod down if you wish, i really dont care.... BUT...
I am a linux user/programmer/lover for the past few years now, and i wanna see a company that is not SO IN LOVE with linux say what have just been said by IBM above.
In other words, i dont want to see companies who sell Linux, or who have benefit in selling Linux praise it. Does any one of you know of someone who fills in these criteria. Sun for one is not very fond of Linux, nor is MS ofcorse (despite the fact sometimes i doubt they have code in their stuff from Linux...)...to make a long story short
It would be really nice if such a judgment came from someone else besides IBM/REDHAT/ORACLE...
The lunatic is in my head
"Just because IBM supports Linux doesn't mean its motives are pure (not financially driven)."
Last I checked, nobody said anything about pure motives - maybe its just a mutually beneficial relationship.
"I think the rest of your post is either biased (assuming IBM only intends this article for a technical audience that won't use it for business decisions)"
Yes. To both technical and business decisions.
"I need something more empirical than this assertion. I don't see kernel developers spending weeks duplicating IBM's results just to verify that Linux is as good as IBM says."
Bummer, all that efort being duplicated by HP, NEC, etc. at OSDL. Of course, you could just fund some 3rd party testing yourself.
SEE SUBJECT: I'd actually be interested in seeing Microsoft publish several evaluations of linux, since I don't trust them with evaluations of Windows. Interestingly, I haven't seen any such thing recently.
BTW, its "weathered", not "whethered".
C|N>K
"The Linux kernel properly scaled to use hardware resources (CPU, memory, disk) on SMP systems."
Sorry, but how can the scaleability of the CPU resource be proven on a 2 CPU system? Show incremental results on 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc. etc. and then CPU scaleability may be proven.
This is NOT an anti-Linux troll, rather the evaluation needs to justify it's outcomes or it starts to look like something from a company starting with M.
1) Linux is free if your time is worthless
2) My time is not worthless
3) Linux is not free
4) Giving Linux as a Christmas present is not "cheap"
5) Linux is a good Christmas present.
You can always go and find broken corner cases, but the vast majority of software is single threaded (or behaves that way), and in a testing situation will have normalized input. This leads to fairly regular errors. Obscure combinations of events don't usually happen with software that's mature, since it's been through many combinations and patched to follow them (IE: Apache won't die in a random fashion).
I've put in many hours of debugging software (my own and others), and all the crashes and other problems that are in software can be reproduced with a test case. The test case is always inputs which travel the path of broken logic. Since most of the computer is a controlled set of variables (IE: library versions won't change during a run, memory bits won't flip, etc), it's very easy to diagnose these -- and very hard for software to fail like you mention unless it's fairly complex. Most software isn't that complex (how complex is Knotes?).
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Minor quibble: I don't think memtest86 is going to do a whole lot of good on the systems that were being tested in this particular case, since the systems that were being tested were PPC, which doesn't run x86 software very well. But yes, it's a nice program to keep around for your x86 hardware. I got my copy from the BBC bootable linux business card CD.
it would be even more valuable if the same tests were performed on a variety of operating systems
How many operating systems run on IBM's pSeries machines? AIX and...?
Espically for thigns like this. If a company isn't the one performing the research, chances are they are bankrolling the company that is. This means that generally thigns will be stacked in the favour, and unfavourable results will often be suppressed.
Even true independants are often not unbiased. For example some individual, with no teis to and OS developers or vendor, might decide to test OSes. Of course it might be that they are a huge Linux or Mac or Windows zealot so again stack things in their favour. You see this fairly frequently with independent Mac test sites. They are MAc heads that work to make thigns look good for the Mac.
YOu see this in research too. I can't count the number of times I've seen articles, in respected journals, where the researchers have glossed over or ignored something that could contest or invalidiate their findings. They want their hypothesis to be true and so are prone to look at the data that supports it.
So when you deal with something involving money, you are just going to see some biased results. In scientific research, you generally get other labs testing findings, so the truth is eventually revealed, despite biases. However in bussiness, espically something with quick life cycles like software, forget about it. All tests are going to be biased. Read the results and take them for what they are worth, don't use them ot generalize. Do your own testa, and use what works best for you.
Or that they used the distro that was qualified...nevermind. You're right, its a big fscking con-spir-acy to promote SUSE at the expense of all other Linux Distros. My bad.
andy
All that this shows is that a Linux based system works in the way that it should. Would you expect anything else if you ran your: TV, central heating, ... for a long period ?
The trouble is that, after a period of increased stability in the 1980's, in the last decade people have come to expect that computers fail, and they wonder with amasement if they don't.
OK: 30 years ago I remember it being a good day if the mainframe stayed up 12 hours. But things have moved on, today you expect your: MVS, VMS, Unix, Linux machine to stay working. The only OS vendor who's products have not matured is the one in Redmond - largely because of rampant infestation with new features.
The above is not intended to belittle the fantastic efforts of all those involved.
Are you locked out of your virtual consoles too? Are you running SATA drives? What are your logs saying after the crash?
I'm running Suse 9 also, and X has only hung on me once(some other apps hang occasionally, but I'm still able to kill them). The only time it hung, I was still able to switch to a VC and restart the Xserver without a reboot.
I use the system as my main devel machine, so it gets about 4+ hours of heavy use a day. My latest uptime is over 3 weeks...
Also, are you running a stock kernel? Recompile and strip things out. I highly recommend people recompile any kernel from any distro before using it regularly. It's just a good idea...
The reason there's no compare test is because Windows wouldn't last 8 hours without a blue screen crash. So you couldn't even start the test!
SUSE 9.0 is a linux based windows
it is allmost as buggie as windows and almost as easy to use
stop supporting microsoft with pirating their software!!!!!
I agree, the graphs do have a very clean appearance. Why don't you pose your question in the comment box at the end of the article? You never know, they (the authors) might actually respond!
For those developers that are not so Java aware (see title).
In fact, it's not much of a question for me anymore -- when there's a problem, it's normally hardware malfunction. I have several machines with 160+ day uptimes, which would be longer if not for an extended power outage at the office.
IBM just confirmed what I already knew. Guess what, Win2k is pretty stable, too. Sorry, but it's true.
But, jeeze, isn't anyone else drooling over those systems they tested on? Makes me hate my busted whiteboxes and horrible HP's a little more everyday.
Repeat after me....."MMMM, dual Power4......MMMM, dual Power4...."
OK, so I don't have a paper, but I remember my old Linux/P166 running great for a day or so when the CPU fan had died. I only noticed when I rebooted into Windows!
My notebook has a flaky RAM connection. 32 MB comes and goes depending on how the machine is squeezed. Win 9x products crash it hard, Linux and Win2k don't even notice.
So in my experience, Linux doesn't mind a hostile platform.
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
My client is a big megacorp. Their strategy for the coming years is to migrate all Unix systems to Windows/.Net (client side), and to Linux or NT (server side, depending on which OS fits best). This isn't the kind of corporation that makes such a decision after reading a sales brochure or a Gartner article. They research their options, thoroughly. Apparently the conclusion was that Linux is reliable enough to be entrusted with mission-critical stuff.
The sad thing is that they will (probably) keep the results of this research confidential. Why help the competition with this knowledge?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Except that this is exactly the test that historians use to guage the accuracy of a primary source and literary deconstructionalists use on the bible to determine who it was really written by.
Put identity in the browser.
Why do you trust IBM's Linux Technology Center to evaluate Linux?
Because the goal of the test is to find out whether or not IBM's customers should feel comfortable using Linux instead of AIX or some other highly reliable OS for mission critical computing applications, and IBM will look really bad in front of its own loyal, big-money customer base if the test results don't hold up in the real world.
More concisely: Because IBM will lose sales if Linux fails after IBM said it wouldn't.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
thats why i ask the question, its because i work in a major corp too that migrates all its SOlaris/AIX/IRIX applications, which include major number crunching/visualization to Linux.
Honestly they were (and i was too despite my years of experience) impressed with the improvement we yield with Linux, and they took their decision based on months of testing, years of experience, and lots of money, and i mean LOTS of it.
But alaas.....nobody would admit it for the reasons you said.
But yet its good to know that its gaining ground, and that the this specific marketing hype you hear is true, when it comes to real life experiece you get in the field; though it might not always be, actually it really differes from one env. to another.
The lunatic is in my head
The very reason Linux has already made so many inroads into coporations in the first place is because of its reliability and stability, and not because some marketing campaign has churned out the words on header paper.
Another point is that I personally expect the sytems I administer to run for a darn side longer than 30, 60 or 90 days unless I need to restart them because of a kernel upgrade. When my last bunch I worked for went tits-up, our SAMBA file server had a 790 day uptime, and had run the SAMBA daemons reliably throughout, as well as doing internal DNS and DHCP. That's what your average Linux sysadmin expects from a Linux server box.
A Linux desktop being used for all manner of things though is completely another story: if I muck around with the Linux install on my laptop, as I do because that's what I do, then I expect to break it from time to time, and so "reliability" is not measured in the same way on a desktop/laptop system, IMHO.
The ideal environment for Linux is as a networked server, where it can get on with doing what it was setup to do, and will continue doing so until someone pulls the power plug on it. In that context, there are few OS's playing on the same field that can rival it for reliability and stability.
but with package and dependency madness.
I couldn't tell you the number of times I tried to install something and it fails because I was missing "X-Widget-2.41.so.1", so I try to install that "X-Widget-2.41" package and the "X-Widget-2.41-devel" package and they fail because they are missing several other depends as well.
Linux stability is fine. The GNU software stability is fine. We need a better way to install and maintain software.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I've been using an old P120 laptop as a firewall/router for my house for the past several years running 2.2.something. I wondered why it rebooted after noticing an uptime of only a day or two, but found that instead I was experiencing the uptime rollover bug (at about 500 days; Windows used to crash on a similar bug after 48 days). About a month ago, it stopped giving out DHCP addresses. I went downstairs to investigate, as I couldn't log in remotely, and found that the hard drive was making that nasty clicking sound. I eventually managed to ssh in (sshd and sh were in ram; I just waited for the logging to time out). I was able to kill syslog and cron, and now dhcp is again giving out addresses.
It's been running just fine for a month now with a dead hard drive.
(Yes, I'm getting a replacement because it won't survive an extended power outage on that ancient battery.)
MS is running ads saying how windows XP is so reliable. It is kinda hard to believe when you hear the ad because you a getting a cup of coffee waiting for XP to reboot. Same with 2k3. It crashes. Not as often as XP same as XP doesn't crash as often as 98 and so on. But it still crashes.
Now on to my linux machines. Wich don't crash. I only run in total about a dozen of them and not one of them has crashed.
I also have had some experience with AIX. Typically on machines everybody had forgotten about that ran some app that everyone just used and they only noticed its importance when someone unplugs an old useless cable.
So from my daily experience I will find any report coming from MS saying that they are reliable suspect. From my experience with AIX and Linux I will be far more willing to believe a report from IBM about reliabilty because THEY HAVEN'T BEEN TELLING ME TO MANY LIES BEFORE.
You of course may have different experiences. Linux if nothing else seems capable of generating wildly conflicting emotions in people. So does MS software come to think of it. Funny that we can get so worked up over a collection of bits.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
And this is the real way to determine it. Run the suspect software on a piece of hardware known to be good or run a piece of software known to be good on suspect hardware. Testing anything with a single sample is meaningless. If you did this in medicine you would be kicked out so fast you might just discover if mankind can survive lightspeed.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Two of the three authors were women. Time for a new Barbie doll: "Linux is fun!"
There's plenty of good hardware to be had from places like Newegg, Directron and Computer Geeks. Just to name a few. Get yourself an ASUS motherboard, RAM from Crucial or from a reputable manufacturer like Kingston ValueRAM or Viking or Mushkin or Corsair, get a video card from a good manufacturer, and you have a nice solid machine that can handle anything.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
The 2.4 kernel has a number of unstable algorithms. Most of the corresponding algorithms in genetic UNIX are stable by design. For example, read the bug postings on RedHat Bugzilla for this critical flaw which has failed to get fixed after more than 6 months: [Bug 89226] (VM)Kernel prefers swapping instead of releasing cache memory
IBM has a reputation, so does Microsoft.
Based on that who would you trust for your backend, must work everyday or we're out of business, needs.
Every on-site IBM tech I've ever seen is a doctor, can't really say the same for the MCSE set.
No one ever got fired for buying IBM.
We run SuSE Professional 8.2 on our home machines, one server, two workstations.
My partner's machine freezes occasionally. Most recent one was yesterday, and even Alt+Ctrl+Backspace wouldn't get control back. I needed to power off!
I've never been able to work out exactly what causes these freezes (my partner is not very "'puter literate"), but suspect that it may be somehow related to the printing subsystem. One time I did manage to ssh into the machine when it froze and the cups process was feasting on CPU cycles.
We upgraded to the then latest patches from the SuSE ftp site about two weeks ago. This did not affect the reliability.
I can't contrast these observations to any other distro. I've only ever used SuSE (since 6.x).
lol, gotta love the fantasy world these anonymous linux bashers live in... no idea what they are going on about, hehe...
why not? IBM is a huge seller of windoze pee cees... If you have a specific concern about the test, feel free to voice it.
Here is an example of Slashdot bias.
* Microsoft puts out a Windows reliability test study. Thousands of Slashbots jump on it and accuse it of being biased, maked BSOD and Clippy "jokes," and generally act like lunatics.
* IBM puts out a Linux reliability test study. Nobody even dreams of calling it biased. It's considered to be a pass of "flying colors," and everyone nods along with the rest of the flock.
"Sufferin' succotash."
You sir, are ready for Gentoo Linux. RPMs are way lame (yes, that's a technical term) compared to Gentoo's 'portage' package management. Seriously give it a try.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Parent +2 Insightful
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
>The people performing it have a vested financial interest in having it turn out a specific way, notably positive.
Bad analogy. MS makes and sells their software. This isn't IBM evaluating an IBM software product, i.e. AIX, OS/2, etc., it's a third party product running on their hardware. Positive result doesn't mean IBM sells more hardware or more of their own software, it only shows that they have an offering that you may want to consider among other offerings of hardware with [or even without] a third party OS to meet your needs.
>If the test results showed poor reliability, then I would understand trusting it because it would go against the motives of the people performing it.
Only negative results are reliable because no one would fake that? Then why would we ever believe anyone who posts positive results? The "nothing positive is worthwhile" attitude is inherently self-defeating, non-productive and relies on blinding oneself to anything that may be good. Forget to take your meds? And how do you compare all the positive results that are posted with all the negative results that DON'T get posted. There's your real baseline. Comparing all the secret/non-existent data to the public stuff. It's just impossible to do. By your logic that would make it infallible.
>Since the test affirms their business model, no matter how documented it is, it should be suspect.
More of the "don't believe the people who have experience, skill and knowledge based on day-to-day operations ; they must be lying because they are more informed than we are" drivel. Documentation of success must be ignored because it proves the point of those who are successful and invalidates my defective criticism of them. This proves that you feel bad, not that they are doing something bad.
>Many of the test results depend on the computer systems meeting expectations of the people testing it, particularly in overload cases.
You know of businesses that buy computer systems that they don't expect to meet performance goals that they need to reach? And those unreal-world testing scenarios have more value than using appropriate hardware and software? It's not normally done that way here on planet Earth. Organizations work to succeed, not to fail and then point to someone else as being the responsible party.
>Take C/C++ and Java.
I would only take them if I thought they were of some use in the scenario I was going to apply them to. If they don't meet my expectations then I need to stop banging my head against my defective expectations and move on to something more appropriate. If they work, then I have failed because they meet my expectations? Backwards thinking again.
>I would like an evaluation from somewhere in-between, not someone whose years of experience allow them to gloss over what might be problems for another person.
Only trust results by those less qualified to evaluate the system or product because their lack of skill proves that they can't be trying to fool you? This isn't skepticism, it is negativism. Anyone can look at proof and say "How do I know you're not fooling me?" The question means that you don't trust yourself to see what is in front of you, not bad intent by the presenter.
would you care to give us more examples? i've personally thought that the determination of the authorship of texts was based on things like "whoever wrote this writes like whoever wrote that, and we're fairly sure who wrote one of them, but not the other" and so forth. that's more of an analysis of style and similarity of content ...
... but we aren't actually there, and we can't (usually) recreate the events to experience them again. the same applies to murder investigations, etc.
if you mean something more along the lines of "was this reporter of events being accurate," in historical terms (religious or not) then yes, that probably happens. should we trust -that- analysis? perhaps not.
historical accuracy is interesting in that, unlike something like a report about the performance of a newly created piece of equipment, we don't have (exactly) the opportunity to run our own tests. archeology, maybe
the whole point of determining authorship was to attempt to get authority -- agreeing that a text was written by someone "in the know" we could trust. but we don't usually (in the case of biblical texts) know much about the authors other than what's in the text itself, in one way or another, or by tradition (which is highly speculative.)
with this stuff, it seems to come down to: if you already admit the truth of the text, then it is self-supportive (stand-alone.) if you don't, you may not ever be convinced that it can (actually or theoretically) support itself.
Too true. I've seen the exact same model of Dell laptop with three different video chipsets (NVidia, SiS and one other I can't remember) and two different network chipsets and no external indication that any of them were different to any of the others.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
A local (Perth, WestOz) company decided to go 100% The Microsoft Way when the time came for an office upgrade. On Friday afternoon, the crew of geniuses arrived to rip out their miscellaneous servers an replace them with shiny new (and -ing expensive) Microsoft-running boxen. On Monday morning, the staff arrived to work, and all of their application and file servers worked flawlessly - but no internet.
During the Sunday afternoon cleanup, Geniuses Inc had collected all of the old hardware, and had they donated it to Computer Angels? No, they'd flung the whole lot into a rubbish skip ("dumpster" in Yankee-land) which had then been carted off at silly o'clock on Monday morning to a waste transfer station, duly separated into recyclable-or-not and the recyclable-ish computers had already been crushed by SimsMetal and carted off by the time Geniuses Inc got around to figuring out what had happened.
One of the pieces of scrap had operated without intervention as their DSL internet gateway, firewall, name server, intranet and email server for four years. Being Debian Linux, it had given itself security updates, too.
They had to scan accounting records to even find out who their ISP was (DNS records had of course all well expired after three days and ringing up a known email recipient to ask what the headers said was evidently beyond them), because my friend who had set it up couldn't recall that far back when an ex-employee remembered who he was and Geniuses Inc rang him up. He told me later that his ribs had hurt for several days after he finished laughing. The company had rudely dropped his services after an argument with their then-resident paper tiger about security, and the last-straw trigger for the upgrade was their inability to permanently expunge a particular virus from their LAN.
Poetic? The justice was damn near epic! (-: They were subsequently taken out by Slammer, too :-)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This is somewhat countered by the observation that, unlike any of Microsoft's alleged benchmarks, anybody who can afford to buy or rent a pSeries can both replicate and publish the results of those benchmarks. They can also read the benchmark code to see exactly what it does, and even tweak it and test the tweaks if they suspect subtle optimisation.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No, you've got it all wrong. You get more funding when things are borked. How else is it going to be fixed? :-)
I just finished reading the article, and I'm disappointed. It seems to me that the purpose of this article is to provide yet another "Enterprise-ready" stamp of approval for Linux. Now, let me be the first to say that I'm all for Linux in the Enterprise, but this article isn't the way to do it.
In the Enterprise world reliability equates to availability. This test used high loads over 30 and 60 days. To be Enterprise capable, in my mind, means 2-nines, or 99.0% availability. That's 3.65 days/year or 01:41:00 per week. To be impressive (and worthy of an article) I'd be looking for a minimum of 4 nines (0:52:30/year, 1 minute per week). Most mature sites I work with are closer to the higher 3-nines range on a consistant basis using a commercial *NIX.
What I'm getting at is that to have a real test give you a sample size that you can trust, 90 days is the bare minimum. I would have expected a 12 month study, and a much better explanation of Linux ability to deal with HW errors. IE - inject disk failures and scenarios which test fault compartmentalization. Doesn't matter what hardware you're running on - a good solar storm can play all kinds of havoc in a data center.
I'm disappointed that IBM would consider this anything more than a science project. Knowing the resources and talent they have at their disposal I was expecting more.
I spilled a soda on my Linsucks and it got all sticky and it broke. And now my Linsucks doesn't turn on. Its a tradegy. :) :) :( :) -_-
Yes, and the pedant in question would have made absolutely sure, which is the attribute that appears to have most upset the indigent paper tiger (catching said pedant in a mistake is one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences, very frustrating for someone insecure in their abilities (which pretty much defined said paper tiger)).
I haven't had much practice on Debian but do remember it restarting services. I know that Mandrake does that, sometimes annoyingly often (e.g. upgrade Apache and all associated modules, you might see a dozen restarts).
Yup. At least, I'm sure that this one does, because all of his other ones do, too (and wait until Sunday morning, and send him email before and after).
Most of my gateway machines only expose one service (SSH) and that on a non-standard port and sometimes also IP-restricted, so the likelihood of someone stumbling across a service that they can crack even several years after the last update are epsilon. This dude is more paranoid than I. Bet on something that gives you a chance of winning.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing