From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1762925AbXGFLKa (ORCPT ); Fri, 6 Jul 2007 07:10:30 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1759656AbXGFLKX (ORCPT ); Fri, 6 Jul 2007 07:10:23 -0400 Received: from mx1.suse.de ([195.135.220.2]:45148 "EHLO mx1.suse.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1758384AbXGFLKW (ORCPT ); Fri, 6 Jul 2007 07:10:22 -0400 To: Bodo Eggert <7eggert@gmx.de> Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH] introduce panic_gently References: From: Andi Kleen Date: 06 Jul 2007 14:05:49 +0200 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Bodo Eggert <7eggert@gmx.de> writes: > If the boot process failes to find init or the root fs, the cause has > usually scrolled off the screen, and because of the panic, it can't be > reached anymore. > > This patch introduces panic_gently, which will allow to use the scrollback > buffer and to reboot, but it can't be called from unsafe context. The implementation certainly has too much duplicated code. If anything it needs some common functions. The problem with keeping interrupts on is that the system might continue to route packets. This is sometimes quite unexpected for users. Arguably that's unlikely to be already enabled for missing root, but in theory initrd could have done it. I think i would prefer if the normal panic() tried to detect the situations where this is It couldn't detect spinlocks, but interrupts off/interrupt context etc. -Andi