Re: Are Section mismatches out of control?

Sam Ravnborg
2008-02-01T22:40:35Z

On Fri, Feb 01, 2008 at 10:47:25PM +0100, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>
> On Feb 1 2008 03:21, Harvey Harrison wrote:
> >>
> >> Question is: why do people keep adding new ones when they are so easy to
> >> detect and fix?
> >>
> >> Asnwer: because neither they nor their patch integrators are doing adequate
> >> compilation testing.
> >
> >[...]
> >Unless they break the build, or if there currently are 0 and they make
> >it non-zero, people seem not to care....sad. Probably the same for
> >sparse/checkpatch, "there's plenty already, I can't be bothered to look"
>
> checkpatch does not parse C, it uses heuristical regexes.
>
> That makes it very different from sparse or the section mismatch
> finder which do not output false positives.

Unfortunately I most correct you. Section mismatch checks seldoms finds
what I would call 'real' bugs that causes oops - but it happen.
It is mostly fasle positives that needs workaround, but also a great
deal of missing annotation resulting in additional memory saved.
And then occasionally a bad reference in some error handling that
seldom trigger but when it does it would oops.

Sam