[alsa-devel] [PATCH 13/31] ASoC: wm_adsp: Fix BUG_ON() and WARN_ON() usages

[Takashi Iwai]

At Thu, 7 Nov 2013 10:47:25 +0000,
Mark Brown wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Nov 06, 2013 at 09:23:42PM +0100, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> 
> > Secondly, more importantly, it's end-users who would suffer from the
> > sudden death problem, not the developers.  This is the production
> > level, so you can't justify the sudden death.  And, with panic() by
> > BUG*(), developers would receive only news that machines are killed
> > without dying messages.
> 
> With the sort of systems these things are sold into users don't have any
> direct access to anything that'd let them trigger problems - the devices
> are sold as full stack integrated systems and the system integrators
> don't generally differentiate between what error handling would do and
> direct failures that much.  It is better to handle things gracefully but
> we need to be realistic about the benefits.

Yes, and think that this is the first step.  At least, we can refuse
the use of BUG*() in any of merged materials in future.  Leaving
BUG*() is a bad sign of lazy error handling.

And, actually your vendor-lock assumption doesn't look valid any
longer.  There are more and more ARM-based systems that can install
OS later relatively easily.  Most of distros (openSUSE, Ubuntu,
Fedora, etc) already provide the installation images, and I know many
users of Chromebooks running such.  (And I know some of them burned
speakers due to the incorrect UCM setup or usage :-)

That is, ASoC is no longer a platform used only for embedded devices
that vendors have controls on, but it's deployed in wider fields.
There are (and will be more) end-users who are free from the vendor's
system.  We are still responsible for them.


thanks,

Takashi