Re: [BUG] sparse warning EXPORT_SYMBOL()'d symbol non-static

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

On Sun, 2013-11-24 at 12:28 -0800, Andi Kleen wrote:
> > Well, sparse is clearly "right", for all it cares it might very well be
> > static, but it seems this is necessary for something in the kernel and
> > we clearly can't forward-declare it in a header file. Perhaps we can add
> > some annotation to say
> > "__attribute__((yes_I_know_but_really_dont_want_this_to_be_static))" to
> > suppress this warning? This is getting annoying to me as well :-)
> 
> We could do something like
> 
> typeof(foo); 
> 
> in the macro. Not sure if that would make sparse happy.

I wouldn't think so, after all that's just using the symbol, not
declaring it, and using it clearly happens all the time. I only see an
annotation as a solution, which is ugly but this crops up everywhere and
makes sparse output pretty much unreadable.

> Also this is really working around a problem upto gcc 4.8. that was fixed
> in gcc 4.9 (adding numerical postfixes to all symbols)  If it's ok to
> let LTO only support 4.9+ the patches could be reverted.

That I can't comment on. :)

johannes