Re: mainline build failure for x86_64 allmodconfig with clang

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Thu, Aug 4, 2022 at 8:52 PM Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Aug 4, 2022 at 11:37 AM Sudip Mukherjee (Codethink)
> <sudipm.mukherjee@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:cov_trace_cmp
> >
> > git bisect points to 3876a8b5e241 ("drm/amd/display: Enable building new display engine with KCOV enabled").
>
> Ahh. So that was presumably why it was disabled before - because it
> presumably does disgusting things that make KCOV generate even bigger
> stack frames than it already has.
>
> Those functions do seem to have fairly big stack footprints already (I
> didn't try to look into why, I assume it's partly due to aggressive
> inlining, and probably some automatic structures on stack). But gcc
> doesn't seem to make it all that much worse with KCOV (and my clang
> build doesn't enable KCOV).
>
> So it's presumably some KCOV-vs-clang thing. Nathan?

The dependency was originally added to avoid a link failure in 9d1d02ff3678
 ("drm/amd/display: Don't build DCN1 when kcov is enabled") after I reported the
problem in https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2018-August/186131.html

The commit from the bisection just turns off KCOV for the entire directory
to avoid the link failure, so it's not actually a problem with KCOV vs clang,
but I think a problem with clang vs badly written code that was obscured
in allmodconfig builds prior to this.

The dml30_ModeSupportAndSystemConfigurationFull() function exercises
a few paths in the compiler that are otherwise rare. On thing it does is to
pass up to 60 arguments to other functions, and it heavily uses float and
double variables. Both of these make it rather fragile when it comes to
unusual compiler options, so the files keep coming up whenever a new
instrumentation feature gets added. There is probably some other flag
in allmodconfig that we can disable to improve this again, but I have not
checked this time.

        Arnd