Re: [PATCH] drivers/video/pmag-ba-fb.c: Improve diagnostics

[Satyam Sharma <satyam@infradead.org>]

On Thu, 20 Sep 2007, Markus Gothe wrote:
> 
> GCC 4.1.2 has been stable for a long time now, maybe you better
> upgrade your binutils instead...

I'd been using 4.2.1 -- I don't want to downgrade to 4.1.2. (btw from
the discussion on gcc's bugzilla it appears the bug wasn't resolved
in 4.1.2 either?)

Satyam

> Satyam Sharma wrote:
> > Hi Maciej,
> >
> >
> > On Thu, 20 Sep 2007, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> > > 
> > > On Wed, 19 Sep 2007, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > This initialisation to zero is not good.
> > > > 
> > > > Because if some error-path code forgot to do `err = -EFOO' then
> > > > probe() will return zero and the driver will leave things in
> > > > half-initialised state and will then proceed as if things had
> > > > succeeded.  It will crash.
> > > 
> > > GCC used to complain: "`foo' might be used uninitialized..." and
> > > this is the usual cure; let me see if this not the case anymore
> > > (I have 4.1.2).
> >
> > Even so, initializing to zero isn't quite good. You could use the
> > uninitialized_var() (once you've confirmed that the warning is
> > bogus). However, some maintainers may still nack
> > uninitialized_var() usage, quite legitimately.
> >
> >
> > > > So it's better to leave this local uninitialised, because we
> > > > really want to get that compiler warning if someone forgot to
> > > > set the return value.
> > > Yes of course, barring the issue mentioned.  Note the message
> > > above is not the same as: "`foo' is used uninitialized..." that
> > > would be reported in the case which you are concerned of.
> >
> > Firstly, "may be used uninitialized" can still be a bug.
> >
> > Secondly, latest gcc is *horribly* buggy (and has been so for last
> > several releases including 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 -- 3.x was good). See:
> >
> > http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=33327
> > http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=18501
> >
> > We'd been hurling all sorts of abuses on gcc for quite long (when
> > it fails to detect these "false positive" cases), but now, it turns
> > out it is quite easy to write *genuinely* buggy code that still
> > won't get any warnings, neither the "is used" nor "may be used"
> > one!
> >
> > In short, there are three ways to fix these false positive
> > warnings:
> >
> > 1. Do nothing, there are enough "uninitialized variable" warnings
> > anyway, and hopefully, one day GCC would clean up its act.
> >
> > 2. Use uninitialized_var() to shut it up (only if it's genuinely
> > bogus).
> >
> > 3. Do something like the following legendary patch [1]:
> >
> > http://kegel.com/crosstool/crosstool-0.43/patches/linux-2.6.11.3/arch_alpha_kernel_srcons.patch
> >
> >
> > i.e., explicitly change the structure/logic of the function to make
> > it obvious enough to gcc that the variable will not be used
> > uninitialized.
> >
> >
> > Satyam
> >
> > [1] That was a funny case -- the alpha linux maintainer is also a
> > gcc maintainer. Alpha even sets -Werror, so either he had to fix
> > the kernel code that produced the warning, or go fix GCC to not
> > warn about it -- he chose the former :-)
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