Re: [PATCH -tip] drivers/serial/8250.c: 'i' may be useduninitialized

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Wed Oct 01 2008 - 04:29:56 EST



* Steven Noonan <steven@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Signed-off-by: Steven Noonan <steven@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> drivers/serial/8250.c | 2 +-
> 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

the change is obvious to you, but it's useful to put an analysis into
the changelog. Something like:

serial_unlink_irq_chain() does not initialize iterator 'i', and that is
correct logically because it is always initialized due to XYZ. Gcc does
not realize this connection and emits a false warning. Annotate it with
uninitialized_var().

and fill in XYZ.

Doing such changelogs is useful to maintainers: they'll see that you
havent just squashed a warning you noticed, you understood the code and
determined it via review that the warning is GCC's fault, not the
kernel's.

with an empty changelog the maintainer will have to do this himself.
(and can easily put your patch to the tail of a very long TODO list, or
outright skip your patch.)

Ingo
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