[PATCH RFC 0/2] coding-style.rst: document BUG() and WARN() rules

David Hildenbrand
2022-08-24T16:33:31Z

As it seems to be rather unclear if/when to use BUG(), BUG_ON(),
VM_BUG_ON(), WARN_ON_ONCE(), ... let's try to document the result of a
recent discussion.

Details can be found in patch #1.

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Here is some braindump after thinking about BUG_ON(), WARN_ON(), ... and
how it interacts with kdump.

I was wondering what the expectation on a system with armed kdump are,
for example, after we removed most BUG_ON() instances and replaced them
by WARN_ON_ONCE(). I would assume that we actually want to panic in some
cases to capture a proper system dump instead of continuing and eventually
ending up with a completely broken system where it's hard to extract any
useful debug information. We'd have to enable panic_on_warn. But we'd only
want to do that in case kdump is actually armed after boot.

So one idea would be to have some kind of "panic_on_warn_with_kdump" mode.
But then, we'd actually crash+kdump even on the most harmless WARN_ON()
conditions, because they all look alike. To compensate, we would need
some kind of "severity" levels of a warning -- at least some kind of
"this is harmless and we can easily recover, but please tell the
developers" vs. "this is real bad and unexpected, capture a dump
immediately instead of trying to recover and eventually failing miserably".

But then, maybe we really want something like BUG_ON() -- let's call it
CBUG_ON() for simplicity -- but be able to make it be usable in
conditionals (to implement recovery code if easily possible) and make the
runtime behavior configurable.

if (CBUG_ON(whatever))
try_to_recover()

Whereby, for example, "panic_on_cbug" and "panic_on_cbug_with_kdump"
could control the runtime behavior.

But this is just a braindump and I assume people reading along have other,
better ideas. Especially, a better name for CBUG.

Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Cc: David Laight <David.Laight@ACULAB.COM>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Andy Whitcroft <apw@canonical.com>
Cc: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Cc: Dwaipayan Ray <dwaipayanray1@gmail.com>
Cc: Lukas Bulwahn <lukas.bulwahn@gmail.com>
Cc: Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com>
Cc: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>
Cc: Dave Young <dyoung@redhat.com>

David Hildenbrand (2):
coding-style.rst: document BUG() and WARN() rules ("do not crash the
kernel")
checkpatch: warn on usage of VM_BUG_ON() and friends

Documentation/process/coding-style.rst | 27 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
scripts/checkpatch.pl | 6 +++---
2 files changed, 30 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

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2.37.1