Re: [PATCH 02/10] x86: Convert BUG() to use unreachable()

From: David Daney
Date: Fri Sep 11 2009 - 11:56:33 EST


Ingo Molnar wrote:
* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, 10 Sep 2009, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

On 09/10/2009 04:56 PM, David Daney wrote:
Use the new unreachable() macro instead of for(;;);. When
allyesconfig is built with a GCC-4.5 snapshot on i686 the size of the
text segment is reduced by 3987 bytes (from 6827019 to 6823032).

Signed-off-by: David Daney <ddaney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
CC: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
CC: Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx>
CC: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@xxxxxxxxx>
CC: x86@xxxxxxxxxx
Acked-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@xxxxxxxxx>

... although of course this clashes with Roland McGrath's patchset for the same thing which I applied earlier. I have to say I like unreachable() in lower case better though...
I like David's version a bit better, since it takes care of more architectures, and also because it avoids that butt-ugly special case for gcc-4.4.1-RH-relase-10 backporting this feature.

I realize that the RH backport thing is good for testing now, but at the same time, it really does look nasty. I wonder if we could add some config-time compiler feature testing - so that you'd not have a version test at all, but a CONFIG_BUILTIN_UNREACHABLE.

There are other cases where that kind of config-time testing could be useful, and we could avoid doing various gcc checks dynamically from within 'make' (along with checking for known-buggy versions etc).

And yeah, it looks better in lower case. That said, I don't care _that_ much, and people can fight it out.

Another detail that would be nice to be fixed is to propagate the unreachable() call into the !CONFIG_BUG case as well in asm-generic/bug.h.


Perhaps, although with a pre-GCC-4.5 compiler, it would end up adding the endless loop code to BUG() sites for configurations where the user has explicitly stated their preference for the code to be as small as possible (by turning off CONFIG_BUG).

If that is acceptable, I will prepare another revision of the patch set.

Thanks,
David Daney


That would kill dozens of !CONFIG_BUG compiler warnings and would make a dont-allow-warnings policy a possibility for random builds.

Ingo

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