Re: BOGUS: megaraid changes

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Sun, 10 Nov 2002 10:43:17 -0800 (PST)


On Sun, 10 Nov 2002, J.E.J. Bottomley wrote:
>
> How about this? It doesn't panic, just refuses to attach the driver (although
> this will still eventually cause a panic if your root fs is on it).

I think this is worse than the current state of art. We don't want to
screw with users who can't do anything about it, which is 99.9% of them.
TESTING is about as important as anything else, and inconveniencing users
is BAD BAD BAD.

Right now drivers with old EH handling will warn at compile time (except
when people explicitly disable it, like in megaraid, which is in the
process of getting fixed anyway). That's a lot better than irritating
users. Especially since this printk() will possibly have scrolled off the
screen by the time the "cannot load root" happens.

I've said this before, I'll say it again: anything that breaks _working_
is BAD. Don't do it. Don't make up new ways to screw with people who want
to test. Don't add features that have _no_ meaning except to irritate
people.

The compile-time warning is _plenty_ good enough.

Linus

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