Re: The sheer number of sparse warnings in the kernel

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Wed Feb 26 2014 - 18:32:03 EST


On 02/26/2014 03:29 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 03:28:59PM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 02:49:26PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>>> The number of sparse errors in the current kernel is staggering, and it
>>> makes sparse a lot less valuable of a tool that it otherwise could be.
>>> On a build of x86-64 allyesconfig I'm getting 20,676 sparse messages.
>>> Out of those, 12,358 come from linux/err.h. Given that the latter
>>> basically spams *everything*, I can only conclude that almost noone uses
>>> sparse unless they have a filter script.
>>
>> What errors are you seeing from err.h? I don't see those when building
>> different subdirectories with sparse (which is how I normally use it.)
>>
>> And what version of sparse are you running:
>> $ sparse --version
>> v0.4.5-rc1-407-g345e8943fc36
>
> Ah, 0.5.0 is now out, maybe you should update to that version?
>

Yes... it looks like the 0.4.5-rc1 that shipped in Fedora is indeed out
of date. With 0.5.0 I "only" see 8,207 messages, which means that at
least the linux/err.h issue is gone.

-hpa


--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/