Re: [patch 1/13] signal/timer/event fds v8 - anonymous inode source ...

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > 
> > Ok, it was panincing, and someone made me change it. Would you please 
> > agree?
> > The system can survive w/out, but it'll be a broken system WRT userspace.
> 
> I'd say panic.  There's no much point in limping along with an
> incorrectly-working kernel, only to have some small number of apps fail
> mysteriously later on.

Well, in this case (since it's at bootup only), I'd agree with panic(), 
but generally I disagree - it's actually much better to have a broken 
system limping along and allowing things like syslogd to write the problem 
to log-files and generally working as well as possible.

If people can do a "dmesg" and send it out as an email, we're much more 
likely to get good bug-reports.

But for early boot, and for something that can't really happen anyway, 
panic() sounds fine.

		Linus