Re: [PATCH v2 0/8] pdx: introduce a new compression algorithm

[Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2 Jul 2025, Orzel, Michal wrote:
> > Hm, that's up to the ARM folks, but my opinion is that you should
> > simply ignore memory above the threshold.  Panicking should IMO be a
> > last resort option when there's no way to workaround the issue.
> On Arm we handle user errors and suspicious behavior usually as panics as 
> oppose
> to x86 which is more liberal in that regard. We want to fail as soon as 
> possible.

If we think about it, this is natural because Xen on ARM was mostly
aimed at embedded developers configuring an embedded system. Embedded
developers might not be Xen experts but they are typically engineers.
These people would definitely want to know if part of the memory was
ignored, and might be able to write a fix.

On the other hand Xen on x86 was aimed at non-expert users -- people
apt-get'ing Xen on a Debian system. These people wouldn't know how to
read a panic so we would certainly want to boot anyway even with only
partial resources.

This has worked well so far, but now we are getting x86 in embedded and
ARM on servers, so I think we should discuss and agree on a common
pattern or a configurable pattern to handle this kind of situations.