Re: [PATCH 000/141] Fix fall-through warnings for Clang

Kees Cook
2020-11-20T20:49:04Z

On Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 11:51:42AM -0800, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Nov 2020 11:30:40 -0800 Kees Cook wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 10:53:44AM -0800, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> > > On Fri, 20 Nov 2020 12:21:39 -0600 Gustavo A. R. Silva wrote:
> > > > This series aims to fix almost all remaining fall-through warnings in
> > > > order to enable -Wimplicit-fallthrough for Clang.
> > > >
> > > > In preparation to enable -Wimplicit-fallthrough for Clang, explicitly
> > > > add multiple break/goto/return/fallthrough statements instead of just
> > > > letting the code fall through to the next case.
> > > >
> > > > Notice that in order to enable -Wimplicit-fallthrough for Clang, this
> > > > change[1] is meant to be reverted at some point. So, this patch helps
> > > > to move in that direction.
> > > >
> > > > Something important to mention is that there is currently a discrepancy
> > > > between GCC and Clang when dealing with switch fall-through to empty case
> > > > statements or to cases that only contain a break/continue/return
> > > > statement[2][3][4].
> > >
> > > Are we sure we want to make this change? Was it discussed before?
> > >
> > > Are there any bugs Clangs puritanical definition of fallthrough helped
> > > find?
> > >
> > > IMVHO compiler warnings are supposed to warn about issues that could
> > > be bugs. Falling through to default: break; can hardly be a bug?!
> >
> > It's certainly a place where the intent is not always clear. I think
> > this makes all the cases unambiguous, and doesn't impact the machine
> > code, since the compiler will happily optimize away any behavioral
> > redundancy.
>
> If none of the 140 patches here fix a real bug, and there is no change
> to machine code then it sounds to me like a W=2 kind of a warning.

I'd like to avoid splitting common -W options between default and W=2
just based on the compiler. Getting -Wimplicit-fallthrough enabled found
plenty of bugs, so making sure it works correctly for both compilers
feels justified to me. (This is just a subset of the same C language
short-coming.)

> I think clang is just being annoying here, but if I'm the only one who
> feels this way chances are I'm wrong :)

It's being pretty pedantic, but I don't think it's unreasonable to
explicitly state how every case ends. GCC's silence for the case of
"fall through to a break" doesn't really seem justified.

--
Kees Cook