Messages in this thread | ![/](/images/icornerl.gif) | | Date | Tue, 27 May 2003 03:24:29 +0200 | From | Carl-Daniel Hailfinger <> | Subject | Re: [2.5] [Cool stuff] "checking" mode for kernel builds |
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[Linus: Sorry that your e-mail to me bounced. Was a provider screwup, should be fixed now.] [CC:ed kerneljanitors, who might be interested using it. CC:ed Dan Carpenter, who mantains a set of tools similar to sparse, but as a gcc patch at http://kbugs.org ]
Linus Torvalds wrote: > Well, I guess I can just tell people about it. It's unfinished enough that > I'm a bit embarrassed about some of it, but I've gotten the permission > from Transmeta to make it open source, and it's actually been available > for some time on "bk://kernel.bkbits.net/torvalds/sparse". I just didn't > tell about it in public (although a few people have known about it). > > Be gentle with it. It does many things wrong, including (but limited > to) enums, but it does a lot of things right too.
Playing with it right now.
> The biggest problem (apart from the things it does wrong) is that some > parts of the kenel re-use the same structure to hold both user- and kernel > pointers. That's a big no-no for the static semantic parser, since it's > literally a _static_ type-checker, and doesn't know about dynamic > differences. > > The main offender is the networking layer that sometimes keeps user > pointers and sometimes kernel pointers in a "struct iovec". David has > promised to look into this, and seemed confident that he can fix it > easily. > > Most people who have used the tool actually like how it forces you to make > it very _explicit_ whether you're using a user pointer or not. But I have > to admit that I've grown tired of trying to look at all the uses and > making sure which sparse warnings are valid and which aren't.
Dan? IIRC you have tools to tackle this issue in a distributed manner.
Regards, Carl-Daniel
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