Re: making kmalloc BUG() might not be a good idea
From: Nick Piggin
Date: Fri Sep 23 2005 - 02:59:03 EST
Ingo Oeser wrote:
Hi,
On Friday 23 September 2005 08:30, Nick Piggin wrote:
David S. Miller wrote:
I'm sort-of concerned about this change:
[PATCH] __kmalloc: Generate BUG if size requested is too large.
it opens a can of worms, and stuff that used to generate
-ENOMEM kinds of failures will now BUG() the kernel.
Making it WARN might be a good compromise.
Which has the potential to spam the logs with a user triggerable event
without even killing the responsible process.
Same problem, just worse.
As opposed to potentially taking the system down? I don't
think so.
I could live with a solution that enables it based on a config.
Then you'll get people not enabling it on real workloads, or
tuning it off if it bugs them. No, the point of having a WARN
there is really for people like SGI to detect a few rare failure
cases when they first boot up their 1024+ CPU systems. It is not
going to spam anyone's logs (and if it does it *needs* fixing).
What you don't want is to kill the responsible process, because
at that point they're deep in the kernel, probably holding other
locks and resources.
--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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