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Comment by cormacrelf | Hacker News Reader

Tialaramex answered this in their post already, and you almost answered the question yourself:

> I could just .unwrap() or .expect('my error message') it.

Panicking can allocate. Allocating can fail. Failing can panic. Panicking can allocate. Allocating can fail. You can bite yourself in the ass like a real Ourobouros.

IMO, a prerequisite to using fallible allocation APIs should be attempting to write your own allocator, handling the weird and wacky problem of initialising a data structure (for the heap) in such a way that if it fails, it fails without allocating but leaves some hint as to what went wrong.

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Oh, wow, I was under the impression that the error message would be stack only, no heap involved, but as Result is part of the std library and not of core, this totally makes sense.

So for `Rust for Linux` they also need to implement a `Result-like` type that is stack only based to solve this issue, right?

If so, cool, thanks, you just made my day by tickling my learning nerves! :)

It has nothing to do with Result, whatsoever. Result does not allocate. If you used a Result that way, you could certainly try to "gracefully" handle the allocation failure, but if you think it would be easy, you would be wrong. As Tialaramex said, you are probably just going to make the problem worse because it is very difficult to ensure you do not attempt to allocate during allocation-failure-recovery. Rustc doesn't and can't really check this for you.

It actually has to do with `panic!(...)`. When you use `unwrap()`/`expect("...")`, you use the panic macro under the hood; parts of the panicking infrastructure use a boxed trait object which could contain a static string or formatted String or anything else really. The box can allocate if it is not a ZST. I believe the alloc crate's default handler tries to avoid this kind of thing, so that it can't fail to allocate AGAIN in the failure-handling routine. It will likely do a better job than you could.

This is a live issue at the moment, so to go into any more detail I'd have to read a bunch of recent Rust issues/PRs.

An addendum to tie this back to the original discussion: the reason kernel devs want these APIs more than userland is that (a) in a kernel, panicking = crashing the computer, which would be bad, and (b) they have a much bigger toolbox for handling OOM.

They can kill entire misbehaving processes. What are you going to do in your little program, clear a cache whose objects are sprinkled evenly across 150 different pages? You would need more control than you get from blindly using malloc/free/rust_alloc globally. Something like memcached would be able to use these APIs, because it uses its own allocator, and knows enough about its layout to predictably free entire pages at once.

> panicking = crashing the computer

That isn't very accurate. In Rust when programming in no_std, you can (must?) define your own panic handler:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/panic-handler.html

Which you would define in the kernel. While I'm not going to speculate on exactly what the implementation would look like, you definitely do not need to "crash" the computer. I haven't done any kernel programming, but I'm guessing the kernel could do some things at that point with shared memory space that is already allocated to deal with this situation and try to recover in some way.

Edit: for example, I just found this in the kerla project: https://github.com/nuta/kerla/blob/88fd40823852a63bd639e602b...

That halts now, but it probably doesn't need to, or could do it conditionally based on the contents of PanicInfo.

Mm no, it's pretty accurate. For a start, notice that the Linux community has been very clear that panicking is unacceptable. The reason is that they cannot realistically do anything to recover.

> panic handler [...] Which you would define in the kernel. While I'm not going to speculate on exactly what the implementation would look like, you definitely do not need to "crash" the computer.

The panic handler loses so much of the context that crashing the computer is the only thing you can practically achieve. You can't retry an operation generically from with a panic handler, it doesn't know anything about the operation you were attempting. The OOM handler gets a Layout struct only. You could try unwinding or something, but within a syscall handler, I don't see how anything good can come from that. Unwinding in the kernel is simply a terrible idea. What else are you going to do?

I disagree that PanicInfo loses so much context. PanicInfo caries an arbitrary payload of &(dyn Any + Send).

Now there is a lot that the allocator could do. If you wanted something to be retriable, it could be interesting if the thing that failed was an async task. If so, that panic info could carry enough information to say, the failure was an OOM, here’s the task that failed, and it is marked as retriable. Yes, this would require a store of tasks somewhere in the kernel. Then based on it being an OOM, see if any memory can be reallocated before retrying, or wait to retry until it is.

This is where theoretically a new async based Rust kernel, especially a micro-kernel, could be interesting. Is stack unwinding in the kernel a bad idea? Maybe. Can it be done in Linux? Maybe not, maybe it’s too much work to track all this information, but I disagree with the conviction with which you right it off.

Thanks for the thorough explanation!

Result already is “stack” based, or sized. It also already exists in core: https://doc.rust-lang.org/core/result/index.html

The Error type currently isn’t in core, but for other reasons, that just got resolved: https://twitter.com/bascule/status/1452029363197784071?s=21

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