Re: OS Reliability

[Chris Palmer <chris@nodewarrior.org>]

Bryan Irvine writes:

> http://www.usenix.org/events/hotos03/reports.html

Nice one.

> This got me thinking, has anyone ever seen OpenBSD crash as a result
> of something that can proved to not be a fault of the admin or
> hardware?  I haven't.  In fact the only time I have ever "had to"
> reboot was when cdrecord locked up the cd-rom and wouldn't eject (not
> the fault of OBSD of course).

Your locked CDROM problem is OpenBSD's fault, and probably also
cdrecord's fault. Our expectation is that the computer will always
respond to our commands.

I have a similar problem with my digital camera: If I unplug the media
reader before umounting the filesystem, OpenBSD will never shut down
(actually, I never let it try for longer than 10 minutes; maybe someday
it would have timed out and given up on that AWOL filesystem). Not even
plugging the camera back in works. One of my forty-eleven software
projects is to look into that someday...

(Yes, I know I should always cleanly umount filesystems. I also know
computers should adapt to people, not the other way around. Please flame
me privately -- I have a feeling the list does not want to hear it.)

I've never had any problem with OpenBSD failing randomly, though. The
reason I am so maniacal in my support of OpenBSD is that, of all the
many operating systems I have tried, OBSD gives me the least amount of
trouble -- by far. Even if it only offered one feature, the fact that I
need to apply only ONE security patch roughly every 12 months would be
sufficient for me.

Sometimes I think SMP would be nice to have in OpenBSD. Then I look at
my Linux system, which ate its journalled filesystem and panicked
because I had the temerity to run two CPUs and to use a particular
kernel version that came out on Thursday instead of the normally safer
Tuesday version.

I blame Java.