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SubjectRe: [RFC] timers, pointers to functions and type safety

* 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().

Ingo
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