Crash a RISC machine from user-mode code:

[Richard Stead]

In article <1826 at mountn.dec.com>, akhiani at ricks.enet.dec.com (Homayoon Akhiani) writes:
> This is what I got through EMAIL:(Very intresting)
> 
> From:
> DECWRL::"zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!samsung!mitech!gjc at tut.cis.ohio-s
> state.edu" "MAIL-11 Daemon" 31-JUL-1990 00:03:39.91
> 
> I am posting this to info-vax because lots of people on this list
> would have SUN-4's or other RISC machines to try it on, and we VAX
> users could use a good chuckle from time to time.
  
...
> From:	DECWRL::"usc!samsung!mitech!gjc at ucsd.edu" "MAIL-11 Daemon"  2-AUG-1990
> 03:25:34.83

I think the risc users are going to get a chuckle out of this.

> [long gooey, passionate VAX-CISC romance deleted, along with code with
> simple jump to random data]

> Just a reminder though. There is no free lunch. There really is
> a trade-off between ROBUSTNESS-PRICE/PERFORMANCE-TIME_TO_MARKET.
>  
> -gjc

Pretty Silly.

Do VAX-CISC programmers spend their days branching to random data?  I
thought programmers were paid to create software that did real things.
I would hope that I never write a code that branches to random data.  Or
if I ever do, I would fix it pretty damn quick.  (My definition of a
code that branches to random data is "broken").  Who could possibly care
that a random instruction sequence crashes a risc box?  That's WHY we
have compilers - so we don't generate such things.  In any case, VAX-CISC
and 68020's have been around for a long time - all the random instruction
sequences that could crash those have probably been identified and fixed
in software.  The oldest popular risc architecture is sparc, and that's only
been around a short time.  I don't need this kind of ROBUSTNESS to protect
me from bad programming - I do that well enough myself, thank you.
Let the bad programmers pay through the butt for vaxen and deal with
slow, archaic architecture (and, most likely, VMS - a regular Gulag
of operating systems compared to Unix).

Richard Stead
stead at seismo.css.gov