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Date:   Mon, 22 May 2023 21:01:30 +0100
From:   Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
To:     Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>
Cc:     Maksim Panchenko <maks@meta.com>,
        Ricardo =?iso-8859-1?Q?Ca=F1uelo?= 
        <ricardo.canuelo@collabora.com>,
        Shreeya Patel <shreeya.patel@collabora.com>,
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        Masahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>,
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        Bill Wendling <morbo@google.com>,
        Nathan Chancellor <nathan@kernel.org>,
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        "gustavo.padovan@collabora.com" <gustavo.padovan@collabora.com>,
        Guillaume Charles Tucker <guillaume.tucker@collabora.com>,
        denys.f@collabora.com, kernelci@lists.linux.dev
Subject: Re: [PATCH v4] Makefile.compiler: replace cc-ifversion with
 compiler-specific macros
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On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 12:52:13PM -0700, Nick Desaulniers wrote:
> On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 9:52 AM Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 12:09:34PM +0200, Ricardo Cañuelo wrote:
> > > On vie, may 19 2023 at 08:57:24, Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com> wrote:
> > > > It could be; if the link order was changed, it's possible that this
> > > > target may be hitting something along the lines of:
> > > > https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/ctors#static-init-order i.e. the "static
> > > > initialization order fiasco"
> > > >
> > > > I'm struggling to think of how this appears in C codebases, but I
> > > > swear years ago I had a discussion with GKH (maybe?) about this. I
> > > > think I was playing with converting Kbuild to use Ninja rather than
> > > > Make; the resulting kernel image wouldn't boot because I had modified
> > > > the order the object files were linked in.  If you were to randomly
> > > > shuffle the object files in the kernel, I recall some hazard that may
> > > > prevent boot.
> > >
> > > I thought that was specifically a C++ problem? But then again, the
> > > kernel docs explicitly say that the ordering of obj-y goals in kbuild is
> > > significant in some instances [1]:
> >
> > Yes, it matters, you can not change it.  If you do, systems will break.
> > It is the only way we have of properly ordering our init calls within
> > the same "level".
> 
> Ah, right it was the initcall ordering. Thanks for the reminder.
> 
> (There's a joke in there similar to the use of regexes to solve a
> problem resulting in two new problems; initcalls have levels for
> ordering, but we still have (unexpressed) dependencies between calls
> of the same level; brittle!).

No, the dependencies are explicitly expressed with the linker order.  So
it's not brittle, but rather very deterministic.

When linker order didn't work for all sorts of things, we added
different levels, but due to the huge number of init calls, of course
can not give each one their own level.

It's always been this way with Linux, nothing new here at all :)

thanks,

greg k-h