Yeah, that's basically what I was getting at. For things like the root hash, it probably makes sense to panic (or otherwise impede boot), in order to have an ea

Yeah, that's basically what I was getting at. For things like the root hash, it probably makes sense to panic (or otherwise impede boot), in order to have an early, more descriptive failure, than to later only implicitly access the root hash by validating the first accessed page of the init process (launchd, in macOS), and panicking with a less obvious I/O error reading launchd. In most situations, you likely just want the regular I/O error and then whatever happens downstream of that.