Re: [PATCH][next] ftrace: Fix -Wcast-function-type warnings on powerpc64

[Gustavo A. R. Silva]

On Tue, Oct 05, 2021 at 08:09:35PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Oct 2021 14:35:57 -0500
> "Gustavo A. R. Silva" <gustavoars@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Oct 05, 2021 at 03:08:07PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > [..]
> > > Or did you not remove your patch first?  
> > 
> > Yep; that was the problem. 
> > 
> > I now applied it to a clean tree and the warnings went away.
> > 
> > However, I'm a bit concerned about the following Jann's comments:
> 
> I should have replied back then, but I'll do that now (and added Jann
> to the CC) 
> 
> > 
> > "the real issue here is that ftrace_func_t is defined as a fixed
> > type, but actually has different types depending on the architecture?
> > If so, it might be cleaner to define ftrace_func_t differently
> > depending on architecture, or something like that?"[1]
> 
> It's not dependent on the architecture. It's dependent on what the
> architecture has implemented. There's nothing limiting the arch to use
> the normal method, except that nobody implemented the updates.
> 
> As I changed the core API, it affected the architectures, and since I
> don't know how to update all the architectures that use that API, and
> do not have the hardware to test it, I made it so architectures can
> slowly be updated when their maintainers get time to. This was years
> ago, and not much has been done.
> 
> > 
> > "Would it not be possible to have two function types (#define'd as the
> > same if ARCH_SUPPORTS_FTRACE_OPS), and then ensure that ftrace_func_t
> > is only used as ftrace_asm_func_t if ARCH_SUPPORTS_FTRACE_OPS?"[2]
> > 
> > "Essentially my idea here is to take the high-level rule "you can only
> > directly call ftrace_func_t-typed functions from assembly if
> > ARCH_SUPPORTS_FTRACE_OPS", and encode it in the type system. And then
> > the compiler won't complain as long as we make sure that we never cast
> > between the two types under ARCH_SUPPORTS_FTRACE_OPS==0."[3]
> > 
> > So, is this linker approach really a good solution to this problem? :)
> > 
> > What's the main problem with what Jann suggests?
> 
> The main issue is I want no more #ifdef's in the main code. There's too
> many already and it makes it difficult to maintain. I want to get rid
> of them, not add more. So anything that adds more #ifdef's to the main
> code, I will NACK.
> 
> Which I guess leaves us with either the linker trick, or having all
> the archs get updated to support the latest ftrace features, and we can
> remove the current #ifdefs.

OK. Are you going to apply your patch any time soon? So, I can go and
enable -Wcast-function-type in my -next tree. :)

Thanks
--
Gustavo