Re: linux-kernel: Unused static inline functions
From: Joe Perches
Date: Thu Apr 23 2020 - 17:24:23 EST
(adding Julia Lawall and Dan Carpenter who may have ideas too)
On Thu, 2020-04-23 at 11:57 -0700, Nick Desaulniers wrote:
> I've been mulling over teaching a class internally at Google on
> getting started contributing to the Linux kernel. I think this idea
> (removing dead static inline functions) is perfect for having lots of
> small little tasks that are clear wins. Do you have any other ideas
> for work that there's a lot of? Like lots of small little bite sized
> tasks? Maybe more fallthrough conversion? Anything else?
Some generic ideas:
o look for always unused/unreferenced, or always static
value function arguments and remove them
o int function returns constrained to 0 or 1 could be
converted to bool.
And some logging ideas:
o printk to tracing conversions
o removal of printks used just for function tracing
as ftrace works well
o pr_<level> macro conversions to functions to save
object space
o singletons for pr_fmt
o default use of #define pr_fmt(fmt) KBUILD_MODNAME ": " fmt
and removal of the ~1200 current defines treewide
> Happy to have folks use your script and add your suggested by tag.
Suggested-by doesn't have much value to me,
especially for scripted stuff.
I'd be happy enough that it gets done eventually.