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

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Date:	Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:13:27 +0400
From:	Vasiliy Kulikov <segooon@...il.com>
To:	Andi Kleen <ak@...ux.intel.com>
Cc:	kernel-janitors@...r.kernel.org,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>, x86@...nel.org,
	Hidetoshi Seto <seto.hidetoshi@...fujitsu.com>,
	Borislav Petkov <borislav.petkov@....com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 04/10] x86: mce: fix error handling

Hi,

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 19:07 +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
>  On 7/28/2010 6:39 PM, Kulikov Vasiliy wrote:
> >mcheck_init_device() poorly handles errors. If any request fails
> >unregister and free everything.
> 
> Actually these are at early boot time and only contain memory errors,
> and if you run out of memory at this stage the system is usually
> dead in the water anyways. The best you can do at this stage
> is panicing, but silently returning from the the init function doesn't
> help anyone. But someone else will likely panic anyways.
> 
> e.g. boot time allocations of cpu masks generally do not check for memory
> failures and I think that's ok, not a bug.
> 
> Your patch would be good if the driver was modular, but it isn't.

I'm agree with you that if allocation fails at boot time, we are dead :)
But this coding style breaking rules that result from some functions
_must_ be checked for errors. Maybe we should add BUG_ON() here or
indicate someway that we have no ideas how to handle error?
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