Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 21 Jan 2009 09:00:28 -0500
From:      John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>
To:        freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Cc:        Kostik Belousov <kostikbel@gmail.com>, Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav <des@des.no>
Subject:   Re: stress2 is now in projects
Message-ID:  <200901210900.29226.jhb@freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <20090118201202.674665B61@mail.bitblocks.com>
References:  <20090118082145.GA18067@x2.osted.lan> <20090118140924.GA27264@x2.osted.lan> <20090118201202.674665B61@mail.bitblocks.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sunday 18 January 2009 3:12:02 pm Bakul Shah wrote:
> Allowing a user to specify the random seed (and *always*
> reporting the random seed of every test) can't hurt and it
> may actually gain you repeatability in some cases.  Most bugs
> are typically of garden variety, not dependent on some
> complex interactions between parallel programs (or worse, on
> processor heisenbugs). You can always try repeating a failing
> test on a more deterministic set up like qemu etc.

Actually, all the bugs I've used stress2 for were race conditions and locking 
bugs for which having a set random seed would not have helped.

> One trick I have used in the past is to record "significant"
> events in one or more ring buffers using some cheap encoding.
> You have then access to past N events during any post kernel
> crash analysis.  This has far less of an overhead than debug
> printfs and you can even leave it enabled in production use.

man ktr

-- 
John Baldwin



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200901210900.29226.jhb>