Hi Paul, While reviewing your recent update in "Hunting Heisenbugs" section, I found the analogy with particle physics didn't sit well with me. "Heisenbug" is defined as: > attempts to track down the heisenbug causes it to radically change > its symptoms or even disappear completely. "Anti-heisenbug" is introduced as: > Fortunately, particle physics is up to the task: Why not create > an anti-heisenbug to annihilate the heisenbug? At this point, "anti-heisenbug" seems to mean a patch that fixes the heisenbug. The use of anti-something in particle physics does not go along with this usage. For example, antiproton is an antiparticle of proton. antiproton has mostly the same property as proton, with the exception of electric charge and magnetic moment. Also, an antiproton and an antielectron (positron) can compose an antihydrogen atom. Well, I'm sure you know all about this. So, if you employ this line of reasoning, an anti-heisenbug should also be a bug with something opposite in nature. If a heisenbug is a bug which vanishes when it is being tracked down, an anti-heisenbug would be a bug which only emerges when it (or something else) is being tracked down. However, it is not obvious you can create an anti-heisenbug for a particular heisenbug so that when the two are combined, the symptoms of both bugs to "annihilate". So I'm wondering "What was Paul's intention in using the word 'annihilate'?". In Section "Add Delay", anti-heisenbug is used as: > Once you spot a bug involving a race condition, it is frequently > possible to create an anti-heisenbug by adding delay in this manner. This "anti-heisenbug" is not a bug, rather, it is a means to increase the possibility of a given heisenbug to appear. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe perfbook" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
