From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S933327AbXCaCZG (ORCPT ); Fri, 30 Mar 2007 22:25:06 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S933325AbXCaCZG (ORCPT ); Fri, 30 Mar 2007 22:25:06 -0400 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.24]:33233 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S933322AbXCaCZE (ORCPT ); Fri, 30 Mar 2007 22:25:04 -0400 Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 19:24:47 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Andrew Morton cc: Davide Libenzi , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Thomas Gleixner , Oleg Nesterov Subject: Re: [patch 1/13] signal/timer/event fds v8 - anonymous inode source ... In-Reply-To: <20070330160850.d7988a87.akpm@linux-foundation.org> Message-ID: References: <20070330123943.8df1aa92.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20070330160850.d7988a87.akpm@linux-foundation.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.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