Re: WARNING in try_charge

Johannes Weiner
2018-08-06T15:28:13Z

On Mon, Aug 06, 2018 at 04:21:24PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Mon 06-08-18 13:57:38, Dmitry Vyukov wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 6, 2018 at 1:02 PM, Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org> wrote:
> > > If you have a strong reason to believe that this is an abuse of WARN I
> > > am all happy to change that. But I haven't heard any yet, to be honest.
> >
> > WARN must not be used for anything that is not kernel bugs. If this is
> > not kernel bug, WARN must not be used here.
>
> This is rather strong wording without any backing arguments. I strongly
> doubt 90% of existing WARN* match this expectation. WARN* has
> traditionally been a way to tell that something suspicious is going on.
> Those situation are mostly likely not fatal but it is good to know they
> are happening.

I have to agree with Dmitry here. WARN should indicate a real kernel
issue, not user input that knowingly triggers undesirable behavior in
the kernel. It's our assert() for states we don't think are possible.

I would wager that MOST developers and users understand it that way.