Re: violating function pointer signature

From: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
To: Segher Boessenkool <segher@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
	Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>,
	Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>,
	Sami Tolvanen <samitolvanen@google.com>,
	Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>,
	linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	Matt Mullins <mmullins@mmlx.us>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>,
	Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>,
	Daniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net>,
	Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com>,
	Martin KaFai Lau <kafai@fb.com>, Song Liu <songliubraving@fb.com>,
	Yonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>, Andrii Nakryiko <andriin@fb.com>,
	John Fastabend <john.fastabend@gmail.com>,
	KP Singh <kpsingh@chromium.org>, netdev <netdev@vger.kernel.org>,
	bpf <bpf@vger.kernel.org>, Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>,
	Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>,
	linux-toolchains@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: violating function pointer signature
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 09:59:51 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20201119095951.30269233@gandalf.local.home> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20201119143735.GU2672@gate.crashing.org>

On Thu, 19 Nov 2020 08:37:35 -0600
Segher Boessenkool <segher@kernel.crashing.org> wrote:

> > Note that we have a fairly extensive tradition of defining away UB with
> > language extentions, -fno-strict-overflow, -fno-strict-aliasing,  
> 
> These are options to make a large swath of not correct C programs
> compile (and often work) anyway.  This is useful because there are so
> many such programs, because a) people did not lint; and/or b) the
> problem never was obvious with some other (or older) compiler; and/or
> c) people do not care about writing portable C and prefer writing in
> their own non-C dialect.

Note, this is not about your average C program. This is about the Linux
kernel, which already does a lot of tricks in C. There's a lot of code in
assembly that gets called from C (and vise versa). We modify code on the
fly (which tracepoints use two methods of that - with asm-goto/jump-labels
and static functions).

As for your point c), I'm not sure what you mean about portable C (stuck to
a single compiler, or stuck to a single architecture?). Linux obviously
supports multiple architectures (more than any other OS), but it is pretty
stuck to gcc as a compiler (with LLVM just starting to work too).

We are fine with being stuck to a compiler if it gives us what we want.

-- Steve