Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Jamie Lokier wrote:
> > Which is unfortunate, because I am trying to develop a model for machine
> > reasoning about ia32 instruction sequences. To generate better code,
> > and to check it. Even in user space, these SMP subtleties are
> > important. And I want to analyse kernel code :-)
>
> Binary or source code?
Both for different projects.
> One of things of my todo list is to hack lint or a workalike tool, to
> analyze C source code to catch common driver errors... Like a PCI
> driver using old pcibios_xxx methods, not using pci_enable_device, etc.
I don't think we care much about x86 instructions for that kind of
reasoning. We just assume spin_lock and spin_unlock are special and
work :-)
I'd really like a tool that can check for missing locks, redundant
locks, operations that should be atomic, missing memory barriers, that
sort of thing. It's not easy is it? :-)
For example, consider the work going on at the moment with the swap
cache bits. You have to be _really_ familiar with that code to know
what changes are valid. And even then you can be wrong.
-- Jamie
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 23 2000 - 21:00:20 EST