Re: [PATCH 14/19] VFS: Ensure no async updates happening in directory being removed.

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sat, 8 Feb 2025 at 14:06, Al Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > OK, I realize that it compiles, but it should've raised all
> > kinds of red flags for anyone reading that.

Well, it's literally just missing a ';' so, the "red flag" is "oops,
nobody noticed the typo".

> > return + <newline> is
> > already fishy, but having the next line indented *less* than that
> > return is firmly in the "somebody's trying to hide something nasty
> > here" territory, even without parsing the damn thing.

Sadly, there are probably no sane way to do semi-automated indentation checks.

> Incidentally, that's where lockdep warnings you've mentioned are
> coming from...

Yeah, so because of the missing ';', and because gcc allows a 'return
<voidfn>()" in a void function (which is actually a useful syntax
extension, so I'm not really complaining), it compiles cleanly but the
lock_acquire_exclusive() is done in *exactly* the wrong situation.

Do we have any useful indentation checkers that might have caught
things like this?

gcc does have a "-Wmisleading-indentation" option, but afaik it only
warns about a few very specific things because anything more
aggressive results in way too many false positives.

I've never used clang-format, but I do know it supports those kinds of
extensions, since I see them in the kernel config file.

                  Linus