From: Joe Perches Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2015 17:35:02 +0000 Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/1] staging: rtl8723au: Remove unnecessary OOM message Message-Id: <1425663302.12017.32.camel@perches.com> List-Id: References: <20150306082140.GA9740@sloth> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: Jes Sorensen Cc: Julia Lawall , Quentin Lambert , Larry Finger , Greg Kroah-Hartman , kernel-janitors@vger.kernel.org, linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org, devel@driverdev.osuosl.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Fri, 2015-03-06 at 11:08 -0500, Jes Sorensen wrote: > Julia Lawall writes: > > On Fri, 6 Mar 2015, Jes Sorensen wrote: > >> Quentin Lambert writes: > >> > This patch reduces the kernel size by removing error messages that duplicate > >> > the normal OOM message. > >> > A simplified version of the semantic patch that finds this problem is as > >> > follows: (http://coccinelle.lip6.fr) > >> This patch removes useful warnings about what allocation failed. The > >> messages removed are NOT duplicate! > > Is it really the case that the information can't be reconstructed from the > > information generated by kmalloc on failure? To my understanding there is > > a stack trace, and from scanning through the changes I see only one change > > per function, so perhaps the stack trace already makes it clear where the > > problem occurred? > It may be possible to backtrack, but this change just makes it harder. > There are tons of real issues to fix in this driver, this patch just > increases the risk of patch conflicts for no real gain. Making the allocation less likely to fail for low memory systems is a gain. The allocation failures themselves are low likelihood events. Determining which specific memory allocation failure occurred has near nil value.