RE: purpose of modular mca recovery

Luck, Tony
2005-08-09T20:57:07Z

>is there any reason to built this code modular? After all it would
>usually not be loaded when it was needed. Not allowing modular mca
>recovery would help greatly because it's using some symbols that we'd
>prefer to unexport before chaning some implementation details
>(tasklist_lock and maybe force_sig)

At the moment there are two reasons:
1) OS distributors don't trust this code very much and they seem to
prefer to ship a kernel that doesn't have mca memory recovery enabled.
But some do seem ok with the idea of supplying a module that a
suitably knowlegable customer would load. This doesn't seem too
unreasonable a position, after all memory error recovery does involve
killing user applications.

2) Loading/unloading the module provides a mechanism to enable/disable
memory error recovery ... so we aren't tempted to add some ugly file in
/proc to do this.

Neither of these are really strong long-term arguments, but I'd prefer
to keep things this way for a while longer until we can convice a
few more people that this is good code to have built in as the default.

-Tony