Re: [PATCH v4] Makefile.compiler: replace cc-ifversion with compiler-specific macros

[Nick Desaulniers]

On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 3:27 AM Shreeya Patel
<shreeya.patel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi Nick and Masahiro,
>
> On 23/05/23 01:22, Nick Desaulniers wrote:
> > On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 9:52 AM Greg KH <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 12:09:34PM +0200, Ricardo Cañuelo wrote:
> >>> On vie, may 19 2023 at 08:57:24, Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>>> It could be; if the link order was changed, it's possible that this
> >>>> target may be hitting something along the lines of:
> >>>> https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/ctors#static-init-order i.e. the "static
> >>>> initialization order fiasco"
> >>>>
> >>>> I'm struggling to think of how this appears in C codebases, but I
> >>>> swear years ago I had a discussion with GKH (maybe?) about this. I
> >>>> think I was playing with converting Kbuild to use Ninja rather than
> >>>> Make; the resulting kernel image wouldn't boot because I had modified
> >>>> the order the object files were linked in.  If you were to randomly
> >>>> shuffle the object files in the kernel, I recall some hazard that may
> >>>> prevent boot.
> >>> I thought that was specifically a C++ problem? But then again, the
> >>> kernel docs explicitly say that the ordering of obj-y goals in kbuild is
> >>> significant in some instances [1]:
> >> Yes, it matters, you can not change it.  If you do, systems will break.
> >> It is the only way we have of properly ordering our init calls within
> >> the same "level".
> > Ah, right it was the initcall ordering. Thanks for the reminder.
> >
> > (There's a joke in there similar to the use of regexes to solve a
> > problem resulting in two new problems; initcalls have levels for
> > ordering, but we still have (unexpressed) dependencies between calls
> > of the same level; brittle!).
> >
> > +Maksim, since that might be relevant info for the BOLT+Kernel work.
> >
> > Ricardo,
> > https://elinux.org/images/e/e8/2020_ELCE_initcalls_myjosserand.pdf
> > mentions that there's a kernel command line param `initcall_debug`.
> > Perhaps that can be used to see if
> > 5750121ae7382ebac8d47ce6d68012d6cd1d7926 somehow changed initcall
> > ordering, resulting in a config that cannot boot?
>
>
> Here are the links to Lava jobs ran with initcall_debug added to the
> kernel command line.
>
> 1. Where regression happens (5750121ae7382ebac8d47ce6d68012d6cd1d7926)
> https://lava.collabora.dev/scheduler/job/10417706
> <https://lava.collabora.dev/scheduler/job/10417706>
>
> 2. With a revert of the commit 5750121ae7382ebac8d47ce6d68012d6cd1d7926
> https://lava.collabora.dev/scheduler/job/10418012
> <https://lava.collabora.dev/scheduler/job/10418012>

Thanks!

Yeah, I can see a diff in the initcall ordering as a result of
commit 5750121ae738 ("kbuild: list sub-directories in ./Kbuild")

https://gist.github.com/nickdesaulniers/c09db256e42ad06b90842a4bb85cc0f4

Not just different orderings, but some initcalls seem unique to the
before vs. after, which is troubling. (example init_events and
init_fs_sysctls respectively)

That isn't conclusive evidence that changes to initcall ordering are
to blame, but I suspect confirming that precisely to be very very time
consuming.

Masahiro, what are your thoughts on reverting 5750121ae738? There are
conflicts in Kbuild and Makefile when reverting 5750121ae738 on
mainline.

>
>
> Thanks,
> Shreeya Patel
>


-- 
Thanks,
~Nick Desaulniers