Re: [PATCH] nfp: remove h from printk format specifier

[Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>]

On Fri, 2020-12-25 at 14:13 -0800, Tom Rix wrote:
> On 12/25/20 9:06 AM, Joe Perches wrote:
> > On Fri, 2020-12-25 at 06:56 -0800, Tom Rix wrote:
> > > On 12/24/20 2:39 PM, Joe Perches wrote:
> > []
> > > > Kernel code doesn't use a signed char or short with %hx or %hu very often
> > > > but in case you didn't already know, any signed char/short emitted with
> > > > anything like %hx or %hu needs to be left alone as sign extension occurs so:
> > > Yes, this would also effect checkpatch.
> > Of course but checkpatch is stupid and doesn't know types
> > so it just assumes that the type argument is not signed.
> > 
> > In general, that's a reasonable but imperfect assumption.
> > 
> > coccinelle could probably do this properly as it's a much
> > better parser.  clang-tidy should be able to as well.
> > 
> Ok.
> 
> But types not matching the format string is a larger problem.
> 
> Has there been an effort to clean these up ?

Not really no.  __printf already does a reasonable job for that.

The biggest issue for format type mismatches is the %p<foo> extensions.

__printf can only verify that the argument is a pointer, not
necessarily the 'right' type of pointed to object.

There are overflow possibilities like '"%*ph", len, pointer'
where pointer may not have len bytes available and, for instance,
mismatched uses of %pI4 and %pI6 where %pI4 expects a pointer to
4 bytes and %pI6 expects a pointer to 16 bytes.

Anyway it's not that easy a problem to analyze.