On 27.08.00, 01:30:40, Gregg C Levine wrote:

> Hello from Gregg C Levine usually with Jedi Knight Computers
> When I started populating my NetBSD drive with programs from the chosen CD,
> a copy of 1.4, BTW, I noticed a package named CrashMe. I used pkg_info to
> find out what it was. The utility told me that it was used for crashing the
> Operating System, but did not go into details, outside of the basics. I
> realize that these are units who are wearing serial debug connections, but
> couldn't you use something similar? Go ahead, and laugh all of you, but this
> is just my humble opinion, and only valid within the State of NY for one day
> only. Will accept complaints, negative comments, off of this list.

CrashMe tries to crash the system by calling random system calls with
random arguments. But at a very stable system this is not certain to
crash the system in any given time, or even to crash it at all. You
can use it to find out what call combinations cause the system to
panic and then fix the underlying (usually severe, because no user
program should ever be able to crash the OS) bug.

It is, however, not a way to panic a system quickly and reliably.

I remember that earlier kernel config files had an options described
as "Forced Crash via keypress", to do just what was desired, go into
the kernel debugger at the time _you_ decided. I don't know if all
architectures had it or what happened to it anyway.

-- 
Bernd Sieker

NetBSD, Net Some Nines.
		-- Andrew Gillham