Re: [GIT PULL] kbuild updates for v4.7-rc1

[Linus Torvalds]

On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 1:04 PM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> In fact, the patch that I have in my private tree that was hiding the
> warning for me on x86 is one that removes all instances of IS_ERR_VALUE()
> with arguments other than 'unsigned long', see http://pastebin.com/uYa2mkgC
> for reference.

Please just send me that patch, we need to do this (and then add a
cast to pointer (and back to unsigned long) in IS_ERR_VALUE() so that
we get warnings for when that macro is mis-used.

I didn't look at the details of your patch, but I did look at several
IS_ERR_VALUE() uses in the standard kernel, and they were basically
all wrong. Even the ones that used it for the rigth reason (vm_brk()
that returns a pointer or an error in an "unsigned long") had actively
screwed up and truncated that (correct) unsigned long value to "int"
before doing the IS_ERR_VALUE(), which made it all wrong again.

And the other users just looked entirely bogus, and were all just
"zero or negative error code" that has nothing to do with
IS_ERR_VALUE(). The code should just check against zero, not use that
macro that was designed for something different.

                Linus