Re: making kmalloc BUG() might not be a good idea

[Nick Piggin]

David S. Miller wrote:
> From: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 17:58:00 +1000

> If we know how to make certain classes of bugs non-lethal, we should
> do so because there will always be bugs. :-)  This change makes
> previously non-lethal bugs potentially kill the machine.

Oh the BUG is bad, sure. I just thought WARN would be a better _compromise_
than BUG in that it will achieve the same result without takeing the machine
down.

I think the CONFIG_DEBUG options are there for some major types of debugging
that require significant infrastructure or can slow down the kernel quite
a lot. With that said, I think there is an option somewhere to turn off all
WARNs and remove strings from all BUGs.

Regarding proliferation of assertions and warnings everywhere - without any
official standard, I think we're mostly being sensible with them (at least
in the core code that I look at). A warn in kmalloc for this wouldn't be
anything radical.

I don't much care for it, but I agree the BUG has to go.

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.

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