* Ingo Molnar <mi...@kernel.org> wrote:
> Firstly, the changelog of the patch that Greg rejected told nothing about all
> that thinking, so at minimum it's a deficient changelog.
>
> Secondly and more importantly, instead of doing a BUG_ON() you could have
> done:
>
> if (WARN_ON_ONCE(port->itty))
> return;
>
> This would probably have prevented the tty related memory corruption just as
> much, at the cost of a (small and infrequent) memory leak.
>
> I.e. instead of crashing the machine, you need to try to find the least
> destructive approach if a bug is detected.
Also note that BUG_ON() will make data corruption _worse_ statistically. Why?
Because most data corruptions are unlikely to be perfectly detected by a
BUG_ON(),
and the BUG_ON() delays the finding of the underlying bug, so the bug will hit
more people before it's fixed for good.
So even in the cases where you could argue that the system needs to stop,
because
we have evidence of data corruption, it's statistically the better approach to
continue and get kernel log info back to developers.
Thanks,
Ingo
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