Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751651AbaB0KhF (ORCPT ); Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:37:05 -0500 Received: from mx.treblig.org ([80.68.94.177]:41249 "EHLO mx.treblig.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750918AbaB0KhC (ORCPT ); Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:37:02 -0500 X-Greylist: delayed 1852 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at vger.kernel.org; Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:37:02 EST Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 09:56:35 +0000 From: "Dr. David Alan Gilbert" To: "H. Peter Anvin" Cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: The sheer number of sparse warnings in the kernel Message-ID: <20140227095635.GA1816@gallifrey> References: <530E6F76.1070605@zytor.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <530E6F76.1070605@zytor.com> X-Chocolate: 70 percent or better cocoa solids preferably X-Operating-System: Linux/3.2.2-kvm-i386-20120306 (i686) X-Uptime: 09:50:38 up 25 days, 3:34, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05 User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org * H. Peter Anvin (hpa@zytor.com) wrote: > The number of sparse errors in the current kernel is staggering, and it > makes sparse a lot less valuable of a tool that it otherwise could be. > On a build of x86-64 allyesconfig I'm getting 20,676 sparse messages. > Out of those, 12,358 come from linux/err.h. Given that the latter > basically spams *everything*, I can only conclude that almost noone uses > sparse unless they have a filter script. I did a bit of sparse fixing a few years ago; my strategy then was to get used to which types of warnings were more likely to be real and ignore all the rest - it was the only way to find anything useful from them. There were some that were very fruitful; the warnings for gfp_t types were great at spotting where someone had swapped the parameters to kmalloc for example. Dave -- -----Open up your eyes, open up your mind, open up your code ------- / Dr. David Alan Gilbert | Running GNU/Linux | Happy \ \ gro.gilbert @ treblig.org | | In Hex / \ _________________________|_____ http://www.treblig.org |_______/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/