Re: [PATCH] Kbuild: Move -Wmaybe-uninitialized to W=1

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>]

* Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> wrote:

> But that's my point, I believe the false positive rate is pretty low in fact, due 
> to three factors:
> 
>  - 90% of the warnings get fixed by developers, we never see them upstream
> 
>  - I'd say a majority (say 70%) of the remaining warnings are flagging 'complexity 
>    bugs'
>  
>  - only a residual 3% are obnoxious ones.
> 
> But these remaining 3% are the ones we are seeing again and again in various 
> compiler output, so we tend to get a subjective impression that this warning 
> produces countless false positives.

And note that I am well aware of the real risk this poses: people will ignore real 
warnings if there are so many residual false positives.

I think this approach worked pretty well for perf:

> So I *think* the better option would be to do what we are doing in the perf 
> tooling: force a build error for these warnings (by default, with an option 
> available to make it build). That flushes them out and also makes it sure that 
> those questionable sequences of code never get upstream to begin with.

... but might not be appropriate for the kernel which is a 2 orders of magnitude 
larger code base.

Thanks,

	Ingo