On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 11:40:27AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, David S. Miller wrote:
> >
> > IMO we should have ASSERT() and OHSHIT(),
> >
> > I fully support the addition of an OHSHIT() macro.
>
> Oh, please no. We'd end up with endless asserts in the networking layer,
> just because David would find it amusing.
>
> I can just see it now - code bloat hell.
>
> And no, I still don't like ASSERT().
>
> I think the approach should clearly spell what the trouble level is:
>
> DEBUG(x != y, "x=%d, y=%d\n", x, y);
>
> WARN(x != y, "crap happens: x=%d y=%d\n", x, y);
>
> FATAL(x != y, "Aiee: x=%d y=%d\n", x, y);
>
> where the DEBUG one gets compiled out normally (or has some nice per-file
> way of being enabled/disabled - a perfect world would expose the on/off in
> devicefs as a per-file entity when kernel debugging is on), WARN continues
> but writes a message (and normally does _not_ get compiled out), and FATAL
> is like our current BUG_ON().
Which still leaves the question, does it really make sense for
FATAL/BUG to forcibly kill the machine? If the bug is truly fatal,
presumably the machine kills itself in short order anyway, otherwise
we might have a shot at recording the situation. A more useful
distinction might be in terms of risk of damaging filesystems (or perhaps
hardware) if we continue, something like BROKEN/DANGEROUSLY_BROKEN.
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