>Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 22:30:57 -0700
>From: "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" <michaelv@HeadCandy.com>

>But, this raises a question: do panics in the kernel, with DIAGNOSTIC
>turned on, still signal a potential bug?  I'm thinking kind of
>anologeous to warnings emitted from a C compiler.  In other words: in
>a kernel where all known "warnings" were "fixed", should it be
>expected that this kernel would never panic if DIAGNOSTIC was built
>in?

Mostly; unrecoverable errors would still cause a panic.

Code wrapped by #ifdef DIAGNOSTIC performs sanity checking of
assumptions made by kernel code.  In your case, disabling DIAGNOSTIC
may eliminate panics, but at the cost of possibly introducing silent
filesystem corruption.  I'd prefer a panic, myself.
-- 
Mike Long <mike.long@analog.com>     <URL:http://www.shore.net/~mikel>
VLSI Design Engineer         finger mikel@shore.net for PGP public key
Analog Devices, CPD Division          CCBF225E7D3F7ECB2C8F7ABB15D9BE7B
Norwood, MA 02062 USA       (eq (opinion 'ADI) (opinion 'mike)) -> nil