Are New Versions of PC Operating Systems More or Less Reliable than Older Versions?
John S. Lawson, Jeremy D. Sudweeks, Del Scott · Quality and Reliability Engineering International · 2005
Off-the-shelf operating systems (OSs) are increasingly being used in critical systems. These OSs include members of the Microsoft Windows family and various distributions of the increasingly popular Linux OS. Reliability estimates of these standard off-the-shelf OSs are needed so, in order to evaluate the reliability of these systems, data were collected from product support Web sites. In contrast to previous studies, the reliability of Windows NT Workstation 4.0 was found to exceed that of Windows 2000 Professional. In addition it was found that the reliability of these systems degraded over the product lifecycle. The reliability of four versions of Red Hat Linux was evaluated, and although the Red Hat OSs were more reliable than the Windows products, they exhibited the same pattern of reliability degradation across versions and, to a lesser extent, within the product lifecycle. The potential causes of these trends are examined as well as some of their implications. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.