Re: [PATCH 0/3] Clean the new GCC 9 -Wmissing-attributes warnings

[Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@linaro.org>]

On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 at 01:09, Miguel Ojeda
<miguel.ojeda.sandonis@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The upcoming GCC 9 release extends the -Wmissing-attributes warnings
> (enabled by -Wall) to C and aliases: it warns when particular function
> attributes are missing in the aliases but not in their target, e.g.:
>
>     void __cold f(void) {}

Apologies if I missed any discussions on this topic, but I would argue
that 'cold' is not an attribute that has to be applied to the function
pointer as well as each of its targets, since it basically decides the
placement in the binary, and it doesn't affect the nature of the code
being referenced.

Permitting a function pointer to point to 'cold' functions only if it
is annotated as 'cold' itself makes no sense whatsoever, and there
could be valid cases where a function pointer may point at either cold
or non-cold functions.

For other attributes, the situation is clearly different, e.g., a
__pure function pointer to a non-pure function is obviously a bug,
since the compiler could make assumptions based on the function
pointer type that do not hold for the function it points to at
runtime.

I don't see how the 'cold' attribute could have any such effect, so I
wonder if it isn't simply a bug that we have to report to GCC?



>     void __alias("f") g(void);
>
> diagnoses:
>
>     warning: 'g' specifies less restrictive attribute than
>     its target 'f': 'cold' [-Wmissing-attributes]
>
> These patch series clean these new warnings. Most of them are caused
> by the module_init/exit macros.
>
> The first patch has been in -next for a long time already, and an alternative
> solution (only __cold) for module.h as well. However, since we decided
> to go with the new __copy attribute, I will leave the series for a few days
> again and send the PR for -rc7.
>
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190125104353.2791-1-labbott@redhat.com/
>
> Miguel Ojeda (3):
>   lib/crc32.c: mark crc32_le_base/__crc32c_le_base aliases as __pure
>   Compiler Attributes: add support for __copy (gcc >= 9)
>   include/linux/module.h: copy __init/__exit attrs to
>     init/cleanup_module
>
>  include/linux/compiler_attributes.h | 14 ++++++++++++++
>  include/linux/module.h              |  4 ++--
>  lib/crc32.c                         |  4 ++--
>  3 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
>
> --
> 2.17.1
>