Re: [PATCH] Silence 'ignoring return value' warnings in drivers/video/aty/radeon_base.c

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Tue, 6 May 2008 21:15:52 -0700 Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 6 May 2008 21:12:33 -0700
> 
> > > can we make it a WARN_ON() as well? that way we'll see it in various
> > > kerneloops.org stats etc etc.. and we also get a nice backtrace for
> > > free to go with it....
> > > 
> > > (rationale: users tend to not read their dmesg much, but
> > > WARN_ON()'s do get noticed)
> > 
> > OK by me, although if we're going to do much more of this it might be
> > time to add a WARN_ON which takes (fmt, args...).
> 
> totally; I was just talking to some others about doing just this.

The challenge will be to minimise the code footprint.

otcompletelyoh, perhaps we could generate a backtrace from within printk()
itself for when it sees messages which have KERN_ERR or some other
suitably-chosen (and probably configurable) facility level.

That'll generate false positives and will reveal dubious choices, but we
can fix those up.

> > 
> > Which should be called WARN, but of course 12,000,000 drivers have
> > gone and screwed that up with indiscriminate namespace poaching.
> 
> how about this deal: I implement it, you pick the name ? :=)

AKPM()!