Re: [PATCH 03/14] block: Make the lock context annotations compatible with Clang

[Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>]

On Wed, Mar 04, 2026 at 02:29:06PM -0600, Bart Van Assche wrote:
> On 3/4/26 2:03 PM, Tejun Heo wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 04, 2026 at 11:48:22AM -0800, Bart Van Assche wrote:
> > > Clang is more strict than sparse with regard to lock context annotation
> > > checking. Hence this patch that makes the lock context annotations
> > > compatible with Clang. __release() annotations have been added below
> > > invocations of indirect calls that unlock a mutex because Clang does not
> > > support annotating function pointers with __releases().
> > > 
> > > Enable context analysis in the block layer Makefile.
> > 
> > Maybe I'm in the minority here but are these annotations actually useful?
> > What do these capture that lockdep can't? Can we just remove these?
> 
> Every Linux kernel release cycle new locking bugs are introduced, often
> in error paths. Clang can detect many of these bugs at compile time.

I mean, yeah, static bug detection is nice but is error-prone manual
annotation the way to do it at this time and age? These annotations have
been around for as long as I can remember and I've never once found them
genuinely useful. Sure, maybe it can flag some latent error path bugs once
in a blue moon but for the most part they're unused and unmaintained
appendages that just add to noise.

Here's a challenge. Can it reliably and in a sustainable manner capture
anything that https://github.com/masoncl/review-prompts can't capture?

Thanks.

-- 
tejun