Re: [PATCH] drivers/staging/wilc1000: fix sparse warning: right shift by bigger than source value

From: Joe Perches
Date: Wed Jul 12 2017 - 04:11:39 EST


On Wed, 2017-07-12 at 08:12 +0200, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 10:23:02AM +0800, Rui Teng wrote:
> > On 12/07/2017 1:04 AM, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 04:57:31PM +0800, Rui Teng wrote:
> > > > This patch sets memory to zero directly to avoid unnecessary shift and
> > > > bitwise operations on bool type, which can fix a sparse warning and also
> > > > improve performance.
> > >
> > > It does? How did you measure the performance impact? What was now
> > > faster?
> >
> > It can avoid 3 times right shift and 3 times bitwise operations.
> > And once memory set should also faster than 4 times copy operations.
> > And add number 4 once should also faster than 4 times plus plus.
>
> And did you test this to prove that this does matter and is noticable?
> How do you know that gcc doesn't just optimize it all away? Is this on
> a code path that actually matters?
>
> Don't ever say "improve performance" without actually being able to
> prove it please.

Using __be32 would be more intelligible.

Maybe something like this: (in any number of patches)

o convert u8 *pu8CurrByte to be32 *buf
o convert strHostIfSetMulti to smulti
o remove useless initialization of result
o remove unnecessary parentheses
o return directly on kalloc failure
o remove label

Ending up with: (uncompiled/untested)
---
static void Handle_SetMulticastFilter(struct wilc_vif *vif,
      struct set_multicast *smulti)
{
s32 result;
struct wid wid;
__be32 *buf;

wid.id = (u16)WID_SETUP_MULTICAST_FILTER;
wid.type = WID_BIN;
wid.size = sizeof(struct set_multicast) + smulti->cnt * ETH_ALEN;
wid.val = kmalloc(wid.size, GFP_KERNEL);
if (!wid.val)
return;

buf = (__force __be32 *)wid.val;
*buf++ = cpu_to_be32(smulti->enabled);
*buf++ = cpu_to_be32(smulti->cnt);

memcpy(buf, wilc_multicast_mac_addr_list, smulti->cnt * ETH_ALEN);

result = wilc_send_config_pkt(vif, SET_CFG, &wid, 1,
      wilc_get_vif_idx(vif));
if (result)
netdev_err(vif->ndev, "Failed to send setup multicast\n");

kfree(wid.val);
}