Re: [PATCH] kbuild: Make NOSTDINC_FLAGS a simply expanded variable

From: Masahiro Yamada
Date: Fri Mar 15 2019 - 12:09:36 EST


Hi,

On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 12:41 AM Doug Anderson <dianders@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 8:37 AM Masahiro Yamada
> <yamada.masahiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 12:27 AM Masahiro Yamada
> > <yamada.masahiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 8:42 AM Douglas Anderson <dianders@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > During a simple no-op (nothing changed) build I saw 39 invocations of
> > > > the C compiler with the argument "-print-file-name=include". We don't
> > > > need to call the C compiler 39 times for this--one time will suffice.
> > > >
> > > > Let's change NOSTDINC_FLAGS to a simply expanded variable to avoid
> > > > this since there doesn't appear to be any reason it should be
> > > > recursively expanded.
> > > >
> > > > On my build this shaved ~400 ms off my "no-op" build.
> > > >
> > > > Note that the recursive expansion seems to date back to the (really
> > > > old) commit e8f5bdb02ce0 ("[PATCH] Makefile include path ordering").
> > > > It's a little unclear to me if the point of that patch was to switch
> > > > the variable to be recursively expanded (which it did) or to avoid
> > > > directly assigning to NOSTDINC_FLAGS (AKA to switch to +=) because
> > > > someone else (out of tree?) was setting it. I presume later since if
> > > > the only goal was to switch to recursive expansion the patch would
> > > > have just removed the ":".
> > > >
> > > > Signed-off-by: Douglas Anderson <dianders@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > >
> > > Applied to linux-kbuild.
> > > Thanks.
> >
> >
> > BTW, I noticed no one else
> > appends NOSTDINC_FLAGS.
> >
> >
> > So, does it make more sense to do as follows?
> >
> >
> > NOSTDINC_FLAGS := -nostdinc -isystem $(shell $(CC) -print-file-name=include)
>
> It might. ...but go back to look at commit e8f5bdb02ce0 ("[PATCH]
> Makefile include path ordering"). Why did they do a += there since
> even then nobody was setting it. Try:
>
> $ git grep NOSTDINC_FLAGS e8f5bdb02ce0~
>
>
> Do you understand what was going on in that commit?


No, I do not understand.

Maybe, it fixed a problem in downstream code
since there was no directory like include/asm-xen.


If you do not want to take risk,
I am fine with this patch, though.



> -Doug



--
Best Regards
Masahiro Yamada