Re: mmotm 2020-01-23-21-12 uploaded (efi)

[Dmitry Vyukov]

On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 8:33 AM Ard Biesheuvel
<ard.biesheuvel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > Should be fixed by
> > > >
> > > > https://lore.kernel.org/linux-efi/20200121093912.5246-1-ardb@xxxxxxxxxx/
> > >
> > > Cc kasan-devel@
> > >
> > > If everyone has to disable KASAN for the whole subdirectories like this, I am worried about we are losing testing coverage fairly quickly. Is there a bug in compiler?
> >
> > My understanding is that this is invalid C code in the first place,
> > no? It just happened to compile with some compilers, some options and
> > probably only with high optimization level.
>
> No, this is not true. The whole point of favoring IS_ENABLED(...) over
> #ifdef ... has always been that the code remains visible to the
> compiler, regardless of whether the option is selected or not, but
> that it gets optimized away entirely. The linker errors prove that
> there is dead code remaining in the object files, which means we can
> no longer rely on IS_ENABLED() to work as intended.

I agree that exposing more code to compiler is good, I prefer to do it
as well. But I don't see how this proves anything wrt this particular
code being invalid C. Called functions still need to be defined. There
is no notion of dead code in C. Yes, this highly depends on compiler,
options, optimization level, etc. Some combinations may work, some
won't. E.g. my compiler compiles it just fine (clang 10) without
disabling instrumentation... what does it prove? I don't know.

To clarify: I completely don't object to patching this case in gcc
with -O2, it just may be hard to find anybody willing to do this work
if we are talking about fixing compilation of invalid code.



> > There is a known, simple fix that is used throughout the kernel -
> > provide empty static inline stub, or put whole calls under ifdef.
>
> No, sorry, that doesn't work for me. I think it is great that we have
> diagnostic features that are as powerful as KASAN, but if they require
> code changes beyond enable/disable, I am not going to rely on them.