Re: [RFC] Mitigating unexpected arithmetic overflow

[Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>]

On Thu, May 09, 2024 at 11:39:04AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> .. it might also actually be a good idea *IF* we were to have some
> kind of "implicit cast drops bits" warning, in that the compiler for
> that case wouldn't remove the upper bits calculation, but would
> trigger a warning if they are non-zero.
> 
> So there are actually potential advantages to just always apparently
> doing the full 64-bit arithmetic.
> 
> Without debug warnings, it's a no-op that the compiler will just skip.
> And with some hypothetical debug flag, it would be a "you are now
> losing the high bits of the time value when assigning the result to a
> limited 32-bit time_t" warning.

FWIW, the thing that somewhat worries me about having a helper along
the lines of combine_to_u64(low, high) is that
	foo->splat = combine_to_u64(something, something_else);
would be inviting hard-to-catch brainos -
	foo->splat = combine_to_u64(something_else, something);
would be very hard to catch on RTFS, especially when you'd been
staring at that code for a long time.  Explicitly spelled out
it would be obvious which goes into bits 0..31 and which in 32..64.