Re: arch/arm64/kernel/topology.c:367:22: sparse: sparse: dereference of noderef expression

[Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>]

On Wed, Jan 06, 2021 at 03:07:24PM +0000, Ionela Voinescu wrote:

> > >  > 367		switch ((u64)reg->address) {
> > 
> > That's not a dereference but I guess sparse complains of dropping the
> > __iomem. We could change the cast to (__force u64) to silence sparse.

Oh, yes, it is - that of &reg->address, to fetch the value you are
casting to u64.  And nonsense in declaration of struct cpc_reg says
that its 'address' field somehow manages to be located in iomem,
regardless of where the entire structure is stored.

Qualifiers apply to lvalues - it's "how can that object be accessed".
They don't say anything with the values _stored_ in that object.
It is possible to have them applied to individual fields of a structure;
for some qualifiers that might be legitimate - e.g. you could do
struct foo {
	char *s;
	volatile int x;
} *p;
telling the compiler that p->x is to be treated as volatile (make no
assumptions about the value not being changed behind your back, etc.),
while p->s is not.

However, for __iomem (or __user, etc.) that makes no sense whatsoever;
you are saying "this field lives in iomem, no matter where the entire
structure is located".

To quote C99 6.3.2.1[2]:
	Except when it is the operand of the sizeof operator, the unary & operator, the ++
operator, the -- operator, or the left operand of the . operator or an assignment operator,
an lvalue that does not have array type is converted to the value stored in the designated
object (and is no longer an lvalue). If the lvalue has qualified type, the value has the
unqualified version of the type of the lvalue; otherwise, the value has the type of the
lvalue. If the lvalue has an incomplete type and does not have array type, the behavior is
undefined.

	IOW, in the example above, as lvalue p->x will have "volatile int"
for type; using it as argument of cast operator will convert it (_before_
doing the cast) to whatever integer that had been found stored
in that field and the type of that will be "int", not "volatile int".
As soon as you fetch the value stored in object, qualifiers are gone.

	The syntax is somewhat unfortunate - it's easy to confuse
qualified pointer to type with pointer to qualified type.
	const int *r
means "r is an unqualified pointer to const int"; the value stored in r may
be modified, but the value stored in *r may not.
	int * const r
means "r is a const pointer to int"; the value stored in r may not be modified,
but the value stored in *r may.

	You often run into something like
struct foo {
	...
	u64 __iomem *some_reg;
	...
} *p;
and, unlike the mess in struct cpc_reg declaration, here p->some_reg is *NOT*
__iomem-qualified.  It's a perfectly normal field of a structure somewhere
in kernel memory, it can be fetched from, stored into, etc.  The contents
of that field is a pointer to __iomem u64.  It can be passed to e.g.
readq(), but trying to directly fetch *(p->some_reg) will barf.
	In such cases the limitations apply not to how we can access the
field itself, but to what we can do with the value we find in that
field.

	At a guess, the intent of that (mis)annotation had been
"this field contains a 64bit unsigned integer that happens to contain
an address of something in iomem".  But qualifiers are useless for
that - once you've fetched that value, all you have is plain u64.
Nor would they be carried through the arithmetics, etc.

	It might be possible to cook something more useful by a bit
of creative misuse of __bitwise, but I hadn't looked through the
places where that field is used.