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It's extremely useful for developing drivers. I've developed drivers on kernels that are hardwired to panic at the slightest problem and it's a real nuisance.
by pcwalton 8y ago
It's extremely useful for developing drivers. I've developed drivers on kernels that are hardwired to panic at the slightest problem and it's a real nuisance.
Whether you should leave it on in production is debatable, but I like at least having the option of making exceptions raised in drivers nonfatal.
- jacquesm 8y agoAnd the reason for that is that these drivers are linked into the monolith. If they were standalone processes you'd love the ability to do post-mortem debugging on them, or maybe even the luxury of being able to run them directly under the debugger. Whenever I had to write device drivers I wrote them under QnX first and only then ported them to other OS's, that saved so much time, at least I knew the hardware interface would be up and running, and the data structures would all work as intended. After that all I then had to do was glue it to whatever calling convention the various *NIX flavors had. That trick served me well, for motion capture devices as well as for high speed serial cards and some more exotic devices.
- im_down_w_otp 8y agoThis is fairly analogous to our approach too, just substituting QNX w/ seL4.