Date: Wed, 20 Aug 1997 02:14:04 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Howard Lew <hlew@www2.shoppersnet.com> Cc: dkelly@HiWAAY.net, michael@blueneptune.com, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Is there still problems with Adaptec UW controllers (fwd) Message-ID: <16256.872068444@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 20 Aug 1997 00:48:50 PDT." <Pine.BSF.3.91.970819234632.25131A-100000@www2.shoppersnet.com>
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> I have never ran make worlds so I don't know if my cpu works doing that. > However, just because there are reported problems with make world doesn't > mean the cpu doesn't work at all with FreeBSD because that simply isn't > true. In short, the AMD K6-200 runs FreeBSD fine *for almost everything*. > The sticky point is whether it can/can not do make worlds successfully. > If you never need to do make worlds, then you don't have any problems. I'm sorry, but this is just complete and utter horse exhaust and you should be slapped on the wrist for giving out such flagrantly bogus advice to our impressionable youth here, some of whom may be naive enough to attribute some credibility to the sentiments expressed above. The load imposed on the CPU by "make world" is not particularly noteworthy, nor are any special secret x86 instructions executed during the process which the average user is otherwise protected from. It is also a virtual certainty that the failures we experienced with make world on the K6 could be reproduced under other types of perfectly typical load on a serious web or FTP site - it might not happen as quickly or be as obvious to the admins when it did (hardly a feature), but it's a serious risk nonetheless. Your advice is tantamount to telling someone that just because a car is unable to make left turns, it is hardly a serious issue for people like yourself who just happen to be able to get everywhere they need to go by making right turns only. That's all very nice for you, but back here in the real world where most of the commercial folk live, a piece of equipment which fails one of its significant acceptance tests is still considered to be a broken piece of equipment, period. A make world failure in testing is considered all the more disturbing (by those who understand what's going on, anyway) because it tests "general" system stability rather than focusing conveniently on some specific driver or system feature which one might conceivably be able to do without. A failure in this area is indicative of a more general problem, one which could strike at any time given varying load or memory usage, and as such it greatly erodes the confidence one is able to place in that system (to put it mildly). In any case, it also does not appear that you've tested your system to any significant degree, chosing instead to run a single and somewhat obsolete version of the OS on it (where are your 2.2.x tests, for example?) and in situations which do not appear to exert much strain on the system at all. If you understand anything at all about testing, you'll know that it involves placing the maximum projected strain on something things before pronouncing it fit for duty, not the minimum strain. Such a testing methodology would only be a recipe for building bridges which fall down during actual use and of interest purely to fools and masochists. Jordan
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