linux-kernel - Re: [GIT PULL] compiler-attributes for v5.3-rc8

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Date:   Fri, 6 Sep 2019 22:11:45 +0200
From:   Miguel Ojeda <miguel.ojeda.sandonis@...il.com>
To:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:     Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@...gle.com>,
        Will Deacon <will@...nel.org>,
        Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@...hat.com>,
        "Naveen N. Rao" <naveen.n.rao@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        "David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>,
        Paul Burton <paul.burton@...s.com>,
        Sedat Dilek <sedat.dilek@...il.com>,
        Linux List Kernel Mailing <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] compiler-attributes for v5.3-rc8

On Thu, Sep 5, 2019 at 10:53 PM Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@...ux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> That's probably what we should have done originally, avoiding all the
> issues with "what if we have multi-part strings" etc.
>
> But it's not what we did, probably because it looked slightly simpler
> to do the stringification in the macro for the usual case.
>
> So now we have (according to a quick grep) eight users that have a
> constant string, and about one hundred users that use the unquoted
> section name and expect the automatic stringification. I say "about",
> because I didn't check if any of them might be doing tricks, I really
> just did a stupid grep.
>
> And we have that _one_ insane KENTRY thing that was apparently never
> actually used.
>
> So I think the minimal fix is to just accept that it's what it is,
> remove the unnecessary quotes from the 8 existing users, and _if_
> somebody wants to build the string  by hand (like the KENTRY code
> did), then just use "__attribute__((section(x)))" for that.
>
> But yeah, we could just remove the stringification and make the users do it.
>
> But for the current late rc (and presumably -stable?), I definitely
> want the absolute minimal thing that fixes the oops.

Then I will send a PR with that patch only (Nick, do you know if the
entire patch is needed or we could further reduce it?).

Then for 5.4 I will prepare a new series moving to non-stringification
(unless Nick wants to do it himself).

Cheers,
Miguel