Re: [GIT PULL] x86/build changes for v4.17

[James Y Knight]

I think maybe you're confused; those functions do not appear to use
__builtin_constant_p, which is the issue at hand. Clang's optimizer is of
course not a complete joke...it can perfectly well optimize functions after
inlining in order to not generate "shit code gen".

GCC, however, mixes up the concept of a C "constant expression" with the
results of running optimization passes such as inlining for its
definition/implementation of __builtin_constant_p. Clang does not, and
quite likely will not ever, do that.

That said, I do believe there are ongoing discussions as to how to best
provide a useful alternative which is less semantically strange, and not
too difficult for to conditionally adopt for a gcc/clang-compatible
codebase such as the kernel.

On Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 3:20 AM Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 04, 2018 at 04:31:11PM -0700, Matthias Kaehlcke wrote:

> > From some experiments it looks like clang, in difference to gcc, does
> > not treat constant values passed as parameters to inline function as
> > constants.

> Then you're also missing a heap of optimizations in code like
> rb_erase_augmented() which is specifically constructed to take advantage
> of constant propagation like that.

> Other sites where we expect that to happen is __mutex_lock_common(),
> __update_load_sum() and a bunch of others. There isn't strictly a bug
> here, but not doing that constant propagation will still result in shit
> code gen.