I think there's reasons that either approach is the right one, but Microsoft has the benefit that if they panic on boot, there's a good chance the issue will be fixed, and most likely before the product is released. (In this case, the fix was apparently just to list a smaller maximum ram size though)
This is it. Firmware and OEM system configuration in the PC industry is basically garbage, and always has been. OEMs tweak until it boots whatever version of windows will ship on it, rush it out the door, and never touch it again unless some volume customer comes back with a bug report.
Linux needs to come in after the fact and run on whatever garbage happened to ship.
(FWIW: in this case the root cause was a host bridge in the tables which had been granted a truly outrageous memory space despite having no devices in it. It was likely a typo, or some test stuff that got left in.)
An excellent quote. The line between the two isn't always clear either, though usually the uncertainty is in only one direction for me, i.e., things I thought were clever at the time turn out to be stupid down the line.
In another career I sat on a conf call where an engineering manager was really upset and went off on a tangent about how X code should not "freak out" every time it sees something unexpected.
I was not writing code at the time and had nothing to contribute.
So apparently they fixed it later.... then came the security issues, unexpected behavior, shit going sideways.
Sometimes a straight crash is not such a bad thing.
I would rather something crash and log than continue silently most of the time, especially with backend and server systems.
One of the things I like about Kubernetes is that the ecosystem (generally) tries to adhere to the "Not healthy? Then crash and keep crashing" mantra when something doesn't work. If I see something is in a CrashLoopBackoff I at least know its b0rked. Stuff that reports its up and running when it's actually hosed is really annoying.
> (In this case, the fix was apparently just to list a smaller maximum ram size though)
You're assuming this was an issue. Manufacturers religiously create artificial tiers in software to upsell users. This is true of hardware just as much as it is software.
