Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 06:40:22 +0100
From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
To: Alain Knaff <alain@knaff.lu>
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>, Al Viro <viro@ftp.linux.org.uk>
Subject: Re: The policy on initramfs decompression failure
Message-ID: <20090114054022.GA11153@elte.hu>
References: <496D17F9.8080605@zytor.com> <496D20FB.5010307@knaff.lu>
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* Alain Knaff <alain@knaff.lu> wrote:

> There is also the additional issue that continuing to boot might hide 
> the original error message. [...]

I have hit this pointless panic during testing, that's the motivation for 
this whole question. The initrd was unimportant in that bootup - but that 
is generally true of bzImage bootups.

And your argument makes little sense: if there is something wrong then one 
looks at the logs _anyway_. Are you suggesting that all warnings that 
signal some potential badness should result in a panic? That is 
nonsensical.

What you seem to be arguing for is to introduce a kernel option that says 
"panic on warnings" - so that folks cannot miss warnings. _That_ would be 
a fair argument.

Panics are rarely good, unless the user asks for it, period. We've been 
flipping over BUG_ON()s to WARN_ON() everywhere where it matters in 
practice.

	Ingo
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