Re: Linux 2.6.28-rc8

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Thu Dec 11 2008 - 15:36:53 EST



* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Thu, 11 Dec 2008, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> >
> > hm, the warning caught a couple of real bugs already. (one in some
> > cpq driver, another was in some networking driver iirc)
>
> Well, one thing that does irritate me is that it scares people who
> can't do anything about it, and probably _shouldn't_ do anything about
> it.

yeah - and false positives also tend to create apathy and resistence
against kernel warnings - thus drawing tester resources away from more
important bugs.

> I wonder if we should just change the "Warning" message to
> "Informational" or something. Yes, they are often real bugs. But no,
> they're not _automatically_ bugs. Almost all the time when a warning
> triggers, it's really just a developer who wants to know about it, it's
> not something that a user should really care/worry about.

ok. In this case i'd suggest we should just remove the warning. People do
get scared by needless kernel stack dumps - no matter whether it's marked
informational or not.

So how about the patch below, queued up in tip/x86/debug? Arjan, what do
you think?

Ingo

--------------->