But can't crashing be a good way to maintain integrity in the face of abnormal behavior? A critical system shouldn't depend on a single Linux box never crashing, in my opinion as an ignorant. It's too complicated a kernel to depend on that.
That is right for safety related system. You always need a second path at least, because of single point of failure.
But, being said that, part of safety related development is, to cover any theoretically possible behavior. Because not doing it, leads to systematic failures which will decrease the overall system safety. Knowing this will prevent certification with according authorities, like FDA in medical equipment, LLoyds in ships, TÜV in off-road vehicles.
At the end, knowing that such bugs are just ignored with such blatant arguments fuels the image of bad software quality.
Trying to find the root cause is also important after a safety incident. Rachel managed to find a way to reproduce the problem, and though it's not exactly what occurred, it seems like she figured out a way of crashing the box.
Perhaps the repro seems pathological. But fix this issue, and you may well have fixed a whole bunch of other issues that are not so pathological. Certainly, just touching Files should never force the system to reboot!
