Re: [PATCH] mm: thp: avoid uninitialized variable use

[Yang Shi]

On 12/16/17 4:24 AM, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 15, 2017 at 7:01 PM, Yang Shi <yang.s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On 12/15/17 4:51 AM, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > > When the down_read_trylock() fails, 'vma' has not been initialized
> > > yet, which gcc now warns about:
> > >
> > > mm/khugepaged.c: In function 'khugepaged':
> > > mm/khugepaged.c:1659:25: error: 'vma' may be used uninitialized in this
> > > function [-Werror=maybe-uninitialized]
> >
> >
> > Arnd,
> >
> > Thanks for catching this. I'm wondering why my test didn't catch it. It
> > might be because my gcc is old. I'm using gcc 4.8.5 on centos 7.
>
> Correct, gcc-4.8 and earlier have too many false-positive warnings with
> -Wmaybe-uninitialized, so we turn it off on those versions. 4.9 is much
> better here, but I'd recommend using gcc-6 or gcc-7 when you upgrade,
> they have a much better set of default warnings besides producing better
> binary code.

Thanks, I just upgraded gcc to 6.4 on my cetnos 7 machine. But, I ran 
into a build error with 4.15-rc3 kernel, but 4.14 is fine. I bisected to 
a commit in Makefile. I will email my bug report to the mailing list.

Regards,
Yang

> See http://git.infradead.org/users/segher/buildall.git for a simple way
> to build toolchains suitable for building kernels in varying architectures
> and versions.
>
>         Arnd