cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha support.s src/sys/i386/i386 swtch.s src/sys/kern kern_shutdown.c src/sys/sys systm.h

[Tim Kientzle]

On Tue, 20 Jan 2004, Bill Paul wrote:
> 
>Anyway, to reiterate: I don't think the lineno/sourcefile additions
>to panic() are worth the bloat.

I think the lineno/sourcefile additions are very valuable,
but for a reason that noone has so far mentioned:
Grooming new developers.

In short, I think a wannabe kernel hacker is much more
likely to dive in and try to understand a problem if you
give them some rough guidance about where to start looking.
For someone who doesn't already know the codebase, that
means a source file and line number, not a function name
or panic string that requires them to search the entire
codebase.

Sure, lineno/filename doesn't help with all kinds of panics,
and it's not as good as having every kernel panic immediately
open a remote GDB window over the Internet directly on the
appropriate developer's desktop.  But if it engages the
interest of a couple of future FreeBSD developers, then
it is worth a lot more than 32k of data space.

I would like for tracebacks to have sourcefile/lineno
information for the same reason, but that's an awful
lot more bloat than Poul-Henning's quite modest proposal.

Tim