Mike Gerdts wrote:
For more of a devil's advocate view, take a look at this research about "Failure Oblivious Computing" at http://lwn.net/Articles/188059/ and http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi04/tech/rinard.html. Mike
A unexpected NULL pointer is an indication that something is seriously wrong, somewhere, and the programmer's assumptions were incorrect. For conventional programming, this should result in an immediate crash. We don't want to continue execution, delivering possibly wrong answers to people or persistent storage after such a failure has occurred, because giving someone a silently wrong answer is usually far worse that simply crashing. The Solaris kernel crashes/panics when something goes wrong and (usually) leaves a crash dump for post-mortem analysis. The machine then reboots and continues. Clearly, systems that are non-redundant and life-critical (pacemakers, etc) need to have a much more sophisticated error handling strategy - but I'm pretty sure they rely on rapid restart from known conditions (eg reboot). - Bart -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blogs.sun.com/barts _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
