jtreg testing integrated

Ismael Juma mlists at juma.me.uk
Thu May 22 09:25:13 PDT 2008


Martin Buchholz <martinrb at ...> writes:
> One difference is the culture of testing.  The Linux kernel
> is hard to test, and doesn't seem to have a strong culture
> of testing, while the JDK has on the order of a million tests
> available to be run, which makes great stability and reliability
> possible.

While I understand the testing point, I am not convinced that the conclusion
follows in practice. More specifically, it seems like you're implying that the
JDK is more stable and reliable than the Linux kernel. :)

It's always hard to make general judgements based on personal experiences, but I
don't remember when I last had a kernel panic and I always use the latest stable
release. Admittedly I am mostly a desktop/server user, so I don't touch the
flakier parts of the kernel like suspend and resume.

HotSpot -server on the other hand has been less than inspiring since jdk6u4 when
running some very popular applications.

I ran across an easy to reproduce crash running eclipse[1], a different crash
running the eclipse compiler[2] and index corruption in Lucene[3]. All of them
started from jdk6u4 and none have been fixed as of jdk6u10 b24. So maybe there's
still some work to be done to achieve great stability and reliability. :)

Yes, I am aware that bugs will always exist, I am just a bit sad that such nasty
problems were introduced in a stable release and no fix exists yet. It also
doesn't help that HotSpot has always been rock-solid in the past, so you could
call me spoiled. :)

Regards,
Ismael

[1] http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6614100 -> Note that this
still happens with the latest jdk6u10 beta (b24) unlike what is implied by the
resolution of 6659207 (which someone decided 6614100 was a duplicate of).

[2] http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=152 -> Note that some
people posted similar crash dumps in [1], but the original description of [1]
was for a crash in a different point.

[3] http://tinyurl.com/64c9px (Lucene JIRA)





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