Re: [PATCH 04/10] x86: mce: fix error handling

From: Andi Kleen
Date: Thu Jul 29 2010 - 05:51:26 EST



IMO memmory allocation fails are dangerous in kernel mode. As it is
probably not exploitable because of boot time, it can destroy some
sensitive data like dirty disk caches those are going to be written on
disk.

It's true for runtime, but not for normal boot time.

Anyways if it happens on boot time the only thing you can do is panic, but someone else
will likely panic anyways for you. Just ignoring it like your patch effectively does
(because nothing will ever look at the ENOMEMs for an initcall) is wrong though
In this case it's actually better to oops like the original code does.

BTW even with your patch likely later code will crash anyways because it doesn't
expect init code to fail.

-Andi

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