Re: [PATCH RFC 01/24] compiler_types: Move lock checking attributes to compiler-capability-analysis.h

[Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>]

On Thu, Feb 06, 2025 at 07:48:38PM +0100, Marco Elver wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Feb 2025 at 19:40, Bart Van Assche <bvanassche@acm.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 2/6/25 10:09 AM, Marco Elver wrote:
> > > +/* Sparse context/lock checking support. */
> > > +# define __must_hold(x)              __attribute__((context(x,1,1)))
> > > +# define __acquires(x)               __attribute__((context(x,0,1)))
> > > +# define __cond_acquires(x)  __attribute__((context(x,0,-1)))
> > > +# define __releases(x)               __attribute__((context(x,1,0)))
> > > +# define __acquire(x)                __context__(x,1)
> > > +# define __release(x)                __context__(x,-1)
> > > +# define __cond_lock(x, c)   ((c) ? ({ __acquire(x); 1; }) : 0)
> >
> > If support for Clang thread-safety attributes is added, an important
> > question is what to do with the sparse context attribute. I think that
> > more developers are working on improving and maintaining Clang than
> > sparse. How about reducing the workload of kernel maintainers by
> > only supporting the Clang thread-safety approach and by dropping support
> > for the sparse context attribute?
> 
> My 2c: I think Sparse's context tracking is a subset, and generally
> less complete, favoring false negatives over false positives (also
> does not support guarded_by).
> So in theory they can co-exist.
> In practice, I agree, there will be issues with maintaining both,
> because there will always be some odd corner-case which doesn't quite
> work with one or the other (specifically Sparse is happy to auto-infer
> acquired and released capabilities/contexts of functions and doesn't
> warn you if you still hold a lock when returning from a function).
> 
> I'd be in favor of deprecating Sparse's context tracking support,
> should there be consensus on that.

I don't think I've ever seen a useful sparse locking report, so yeah, no
tears shed on removing it.