[jbangert]

But do you want your box to send silently corrupted data for the next two years? Or would you rather reboot every night, and maybe escalate to your red hat support contract, where someone will then fix the underlying bug (for which you now have crashdumps),

[AndrewDucker]

I'd want it to log that it's going wrong, and report that so that it can be fixed.

[marcosdumay]

What data exactly is being corrupted?

Fail fast is a great philosophy for end-user software. But it is not that strictly good for middleware, and is almost certainly wrong for a kernel.

[azernik]

If you're a desktop user, or a sysadmin without said support contract, you want the former.

[jandrese]

That Redhat support contract won't save you from a bug in a binary blob network driver.

Crashing the whole kernel at the drop of a hat seems like a pretty extreme stance to take as a general policy IMHO. Killing and restarting the driver will usually suffice, although some data may be lost and have to be retransmitted.