Old fogie anecdote time!
I was once told that there was a known spacecraft-destroying bug in the Space Shuttle software. It would happen if the pilot pushed the wrong button during ascent. They chose not to (attempt to) fix it. A known bug that could be avoided by telling a highly-trained pilot "see that button? don't push it until you're in orbit" was seen as less risky than changing the code.
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Brian Marick
In response to this postI once helped test one of the early true multiprocessor Unix kernels (more than one processor could be running kernel code at the same time). My contribution was a program called `churn` that was easily tweaked to hammer on particular system calls with many processors at the same time. It was great fun! Only one configuration failed to crash the system. (It was also a fun use of code coverage*.)
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In one configuration, what I "churned" was the mount/umount system calls (used to attach new disks to the system). I discovered a race where badly-timed sequences of mounts in a short time would crash the system.
Tempers were somewhat frayed by that time in the project, as I recall, and I got dressed down by what we'd today call the CTO for filing stupid bugs: no actual user would ever have that pattern of behavior.
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by Brian Marick ;
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