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To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.tfs.com>
Cc: Michael Hancock <michaelh@cet.co.jp>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: kernel assertions 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 29 Jul 1996 15:43:16 +0200."
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Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 19:41:56 +0530
From: A JOSEPH KOSHY <koshy@india.hp.com>
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>>>>>> "mh" == "Michael Hancock", "phk" == "Poul Henning-Kamp" >>>>>

mh>Any comments on introducing an assertion macro for kernel code that panics
	...
mh>could be called KASSERT or KERN_ASSERT.

phk> I like this idea.

Its been my experience that judicious use of ASSERTs goes a long way
in assuring code quality.  Even better is of course a thorough code review :-).

However, some of these checks should probably remain even in a production 
kernel since pathological situations do arise, and its better to abort than 
corrupt user data silently.

So we probably have two kinds of asserts here: one kind is thorough but
expensive (which could be removed using -DNDEBUG or whatever) and the other 
that is minimal and cheap.

Koshy