Re: [PATCH v1 0/5] Support Clang context analysis for RDMA/efa

[Timothy Day <timday@thelustrecollective.com>]

On Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:10:30 +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 16, 2026 at 11:16:53PM -0400, Timothy Day wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > This series adds annotations for Clang's context analysis to the
> > RDMA/efa driver.
> >
> > Clang context analysis was recently added in a series by Marco
> > Elver [1]. This allows the compiler to validate different
> > locking patterns at compile time. This series enables context
> > analysis and adds new annotations.
> >
> > The series was built with Clang 23 (since the minimum Clang
> > version for this feature was recently bumped to 23 in 7.2+ [2])
> > with CONFIG_WARN_CONTEXT_ANALYSIS enabled. I based this series
> > on rdma/for-next.
> >
> > I'd appreciate reviews and suggestions. I'm especially interested
> > in suggestions on how we can make this easier to enable in other
> > parts of the rdma subsystem.
>
> Yes, this is precisely why I'm not rushing to apply it. It would
> be far more compelling to first apply this context analysis to
> drivers/infiniband/core, so we can evaluate both its benefits and
> drawbacks.

That's fair - the context analysis work is still pretty new. There
are some examples in other subsystems. I submitted a series to
convert ext2 [1]. And there's some on-going work in the block layer
to enable this for nvme and other drivers [2].

> On the other hand, converting drivers incrementally is the safer
> approach.

The annotations should be a no-op without CONFIG_WARN_CONTEXT_ANALYSIS
enabled.

Generally, I'm looking for false positives/negatives in the
analysis and opportunities to create helper functions/macros
to reduce the amount of manual annotation required. I started
with smaller drivers to hopefully reduce the amount of churn
required for larger components. Also, core code tends to have
more complex locking patterns.

But I can prepare a series for core/, if there's interest
in reviewing it. We can also hold off a bit if you want to
wait for more adoption in other subsystems.

Tim Day

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/20260712165610.366474-1-timday@thelustrecollective.com/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260706141452.3008233-1-nilay@linux.ibm.com/