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

[Borislav Petkov]

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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