Re: [PATCH] mm/memory.c: remove warning from an uninitialized spinlock. was: Re: 2.6.21-rc7-mm2

From: Borislav Petkov
Date: Sat Apr 28 2007 - 01:59:29 EST


On Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 05:22:30PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:25:19 +0200
> Borislav Petkov <bbpetkov@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> >
> > Remove build warning mm/memory.c:1491: warning: 'ptl' may be used uninitialized in this function.
> > The spinlock pointer is assigned to null since it gets overwritten right away in
> > pte_alloc_map_lock().
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov <bbpetkov@xxxxxxxx>
> > ---
> >
> > Index: linux-mm/mm/memory.c
> > ===================================================================
> > --- linux-mm.orig/mm/memory.c 2007-04-26 19:57:14.000000000 +0200
> > +++ linux-mm/mm/memory.c 2007-04-26 20:00:30.000000000 +0200
> > @@ -1488,7 +1488,7 @@
> > pte_t *pte;
> > int err;
> > struct page *pmd_page;
> > - spinlock_t *ptl;
> > + spinlock_t *ptl = NULL;
> >
> > pte = (mm == &init_mm) ?
> > pte_alloc_kernel(pmd, addr) :
> >
>
> yes, I've been staring unhappily at this for some time.
>
> Your change adds seven bytes of text to this function for no runtime
> benefit, just to fix a build-time warning. It's a general problem.
>
>
> Often we just leave the warning in place and curse gcc each time it flies
> past. Sometimes the code can be restructured in a sensible fashion to
> avoid the warning; often it cannot.
>
> But I don't think I want to put up with a warning coming out of core MM all
> the time so let's go with the following silliness which adds no additional
> runtime cost.
>
> --- a/mm/memory.c~add-apply_to_page_range-which-applies-a-function-to-a-pte-range-fix
> +++ a/mm/memory.c
> @@ -1455,7 +1455,7 @@ static int apply_to_pte_range(struct mm_
> pte_t *pte;
> int err;
> struct page *pmd_page;
> - spinlock_t *ptl;
> + spinlock_t *ptl = ptl; /* Suppress gcc warning */
>
> pte = (mm == &init_mm) ?
> pte_alloc_kernel(pmd, addr) :
> _

Yeah,
I saw in other places that usually a NULL/0 is assigned to such a type of pointer.
However, writing code which looks pretty silly just to shut up gcc is pretty
senseless, IMHO. Isn't there such a tweak in gcc to say that this pointer is
going to be assigned to later on, so don't issue a warning. Something like

__attribute__ __address_will_be_overwritten_so_don't_bother_warning_me__?

/me going to read gcc docs...

--
Regards/Gruß,
Boris.
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