Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 4 Dec 2006 12:48:51 +0100 | From | Ingo Molnar <> | Subject | Re: [RFC] timers, pointers to functions and type safety |
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* Al Viro <viro@ftp.linux.org.uk> wrote:
> > This is going to make a lot of data structures smaller, when the > > timer_list is embedded in the structure itself and for the lot, > > which ignores the timer callback argument anyway. > > container_of => still lousy type safety. All over the sodding place.
the question is: which is more important, the type safety of a container_of() [or type cast], which if we get it wrong produces a /very/ trivial crash that is trivial to fix - or embedded timers data structure size all around the kernel? I believe the latter is more important.
and we could have a runtime debugging option to tie the type of the structure to the timer list entry. For example by using __builtin_classify_type(), sizeof() and offsetof() to fingerprint timer structs at init_timer time, and then checking for that at container_of() time - or something like that. In fact, gcc should really give us a better way to categorize types than __builtin_classify_type(). We could probably improve the situation by having some global registry of types known to the kernel, via a huge switch() around __builtin_types_compatible_p().
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