From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Mar 31 13:58:14 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id NAA01097 for hackers-outgoing; Sun, 31 Mar 1996 13:58:14 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.think.com (Mail1.Think.COM [131.239.33.245]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id NAA01091 for ; Sun, 31 Mar 1996 13:58:11 -0800 (PST) Received: from Early-Bird-1.Think.COM by mail.think.com; Sun, 31 Mar 96 16:58:07 -0500 Received: from compound ([206.10.99.151]) by Early-Bird.Think.COM; Sun, 31 Mar 96 16:58:03 EST Received: (from alk@localhost) by compound (8.6.12/8.6.112) id PAA26843; Sun, 31 Mar 1996 15:59:25 -0600 Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996 15:59:25 -0600 Message-Id: <199603312159.PAA26843@compound> From: Tony Kimball To: hackers@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: random traps Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk I once had a program which might do the stability of FreeBSD a world of good, if applied in earnest. That program generated random syscalls. It would reliably crash Ultrix or SunOS 4.0.x or 4.1.[01] within 5-50 seconds (depending on the OS more strongly than chance:-), but it would run forever under SunOS 4.1.[23] (or more precisely would run repeatedly ad nauseam without crashing the box). I haven't tried it in a few years, on more modern systems, but the degree of resistance to this abuse was at the time almost perfectly correlative to my intuitive notion of OS quality. So... I wonder whether the intuitive quality of FreeBSD might not be given a hand up by such a treatment... Just a thought. //alk