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From: gjc@buitc.bu.edu (George J. Carrette)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: machines with some loadable microcode are easier to fix
Message-ID: <71693@bu.edu.bu.edu>
Date: 6 Jan 91 18:35:36 GMT
References: <71537@bu.edu.bu.edu> <1991Jan6.033536.14108@zoo.toronto.edu>
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Reply-To: gjc@buitc.bu.edu (George J. Carrette)
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Organization: Information Technology, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
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In article <1991Jan6.033536.14108@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In case you didn't notice, it crashed some other CISCs and failed to crash
>a number of RISCs when people tried it out more widely.
>-- 

Some people tried it on various CISCS that didn't have protected mode
operating systems. Obviously stupid to try, and anybody who would
take those results seriously is even more stupid.

One report of an actual CISC implementation hardware BUG was for a SUN-3
of some kind. A bug with some off-chip hardware.

Unfortunately there are not many good independant testers here.  I know of
some serious O/S bugs found by crashme that have been effectively
hushed-up by the manufacturers.

Quite a few people sent me mail saying "I tried crashme x y z on my
PDQ RISC" and it didn't crash, so you must be full of it.
Of course X Y Z was what crashed say a SPARC with one version of the OS
and PDQ was some entirely different processor. 

Private mail indicated that CRASHME.C raised quite a real fuss at one
large hardware manufacturer that has an R&D budget larger than SUN
microsystems total sales.

People should have more fun with this! There are a lot more funny
things left to discover.

-gjc