Re: why panic(9) ?

On 12/01/2011 00:03, Garrett Cooper wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 12:11 PM, David DEMELIER
> <demelier.david_at_gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm just guessing why current BSD panic() when a problem occurs, all
>> modern operating systems solve the problem instead of crashing
>> suddently and corrupting all your data without saving your work.
>>
>> Yes, why this function exists? There is no way to solve a problem
>> without panic'ing? Is panic really needed? Imagine someone working on
>> something really important and his computer just panic, his work not
>> saved everybody shout at him in the corporation. He lose his job, his
>> wife, his dog, everything is wrong, just because of a panic() !
>>
>> Seriously, I really hate when I play some music that suddenly the
>> music get stucked in a infinite loop, why ? I don't know because the
>> panic does not core dump. But after some search I found that the panic
>> was done because of conky. How the hell conky can panic FreeBSD? We
>> are in 2011 ! I think even Window 2000 does not crash on a user-land
>> software.
>>
>> I'm guessing now, if minix panic when a bloated crappy software is
>> running. I think Andrew is in the right way.
>
>      So I guess with that reasoning we don't need asserts, bugs never
> occur, and the if the computer catches on fire we should just let it
> burn up instead of getting an extinguisher and put it out :D?
>      As an example: I would rather have my PC panic and not write out
> corrupt data to disk instead of write out that corrupt data to disk.
> The latter has happened with userland apps on occasion before they
> crash, and that really fries my bacon... Similarly, if we're beyond
> recovery, panicing is the best and only option, but yes... recovery
> could be handled better in some cases. Filesystems are a bit trickier
> though because they're more mission critical than say a non-critical
> device driver (my sound driver?) tanking.
> Thanks,
> -Garrett

In any case, when panic occurs, switching display to the tty can be 
great. Why not a sysctl like kern.tty_on_panic? Because when you're 
running X and a panic occurs not everybody understand what happens.

Or the problem for me, when a panic occurs it *NEVER* core dump. 
Absolutely never, it stops at a moment but does not finish so I need to 
be in tty to debug directly so that's why a tty switch may helps in my 
case :-)

-- 
David Demelier