Re: crash in timerfd building pandoc / ghc94 related

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>> It seems so far, from not really paying attention, that there is
>> nothing wrong with ghc but that there is a bug in the kernel.
> Yes of course no userland code should be able to crash the kernel :D

I used to think so.  Then it occurred to me that there are various ways
for userland to crash the kernel which are perfectly reasonable, where
of course "reasonable" is a vague term, meaning maybe something like "I
don't think they indicate anything in need of fixing".  Perhaps the
simplest is

dd if=/dev/urandom bs=65536 of=/dev/mem

but there are others.

Yet I can't help feeling that there is some sense in which it *is* fair
to say that userland should never be able to crash the kernel.  I have
been mulling over this paradox for some time but have not come up with
an alternative phrasing that avoids the reasonable crashes while still
capturing a significant fraction of the useful meaning.

/~\ The ASCII				  Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML		mouse%rodents-montreal.org@localhost
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B