From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753823AbaB0ALk (ORCPT ); Wed, 26 Feb 2014 19:11:40 -0500 Received: from terminus.zytor.com ([198.137.202.10]:47500 "EHLO mail.zytor.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751685AbaB0ALi (ORCPT ); Wed, 26 Feb 2014 19:11:38 -0500 Message-ID: <530E82B2.3040305@zytor.com> Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2014 16:11:30 -0800 From: "H. Peter Anvin" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.2.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Greg KH CC: Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: The sheer number of sparse warnings in the kernel References: <530E6F76.1070605@zytor.com> <20140226232859.GA9213@kroah.com> In-Reply-To: <20140226232859.GA9213@kroah.com> X-Enigmail-Version: 1.6 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 02/26/2014 03:28 PM, Greg KH wrote: >> >> What do we need to do to actually make our tools be able to do work for >> us? Newbie projects to clean up? Trying to get the larger Linux >> companies to put resources on it? > > It's not the easiest "newbie" project as usually the first reflex to > "just cast it away" is wrong for a lot of sparse warnings. I know this > from people trying to fix up the sparse warnings in drivers/staging/ > I have seen this phenomenon, too. I also see a bunch of sparse warnings which are clearly bogus, for example complaining about sizeof(bool) when in bits like: __this_cpu_write(swallow_nmi, false); So getting this to the point where it is genuinely useful and can be made a ubiquitous part of the Linux development process is going to take more work and probably involve improvements to sparse so we can indicate in the kernel sources when something is okay or removing completely bogus warnings, and so on. The bigger question, again, is what do we need to do to make this happen, assuming it is worth doing? We certainly have had bugs, including security holes, which sparse would have caught. At the same time, this kind of work tends to not be the kind that attract the top hackers, unfortunately, as it is not "fun". -hpa