Subject: Re: [PATCH] SLAB_PANIC cleanup

From: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 01:28:00 -0300

Em Tue, Aug 17, 2004 at 03:07:39PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig escreveu:
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2004 at 09:38:16AM -0400, James Morris wrote:
> > Yes, although I'm not clear on what should be done.  Returning an error
> > via an initcall does not do anything, so if these were built statically,
> > then the kernel would go on running after they failed.  This is a general
> > problem.  e.g. IPv6, which is commonly built as a module, will panic if
> > kmem_cache_create() fails during module load in several places.
> 
> The ipv6 behaviour is definnitly bad.  OOM situations shouldn't panic
> the kernel.
> 
> If something is can be built modular it surely isn't important enough to
> panic the kernel on bootup if it can't initialize - after all people can
> run a kernel without the module loaded just fine.

Agreed, not because it is "not important", but because panicing at module
load, even in very rare cases is unnacceptable IMHO.

- Arnaldo