On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 08:11:36AM -0700, Kelly Clowers wrote:
On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 11:55 PM, Long Wind<longwind2009@gmail.com> wrote:
linux is stable, or is it?
Sure, but there is difference between stable and "never crashes,
ever". Namely one is a real thing, and the other does not and cannot
exist, it is purely theoretical.
Even with a provably correct program (and we cannot prove anything so
complex as a full featured OS kernel, much less desktop, etc),
hardware could fail in one way or another... a cosmic ray could hit a
memory cell or a cpu transistor, and it could crash. You can add error
handling to try to deal with all sorts of errors but you can't catch
everything, and the error handling code has bugs of its own.
Not to hijack the thread, but I was thinking about this and desktop systems.
That is, whether folks use ECC RAM for their desktops. Also, how many crashes
might be attributed to RAM errors. I can't find the link, but I once came a
across a Google study that claimed it happens a lot more often than not.
Though, one would need to buy or currently be using a motherboard that
supports ECC. I generally use Tyan boards and most have supported ECC RAM.
Personally, I don't see the cost as prohibitive as I only upgrade maybe once
every 5-8 years.
Nick