Re: Warnings on global symbols accessed only from assembly code

[Christopher Li <sparse@chrisli.org>]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 4:00 PM, Ahmed S. Darwish <darwish.07@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is there a way to let sparse avoid emitting warnings like:
>
>   symbol 'X' was not declared. Should it be static?
>
> for global methods that are only accessed from assembly files?
>

You mean other than declare it as function prototype first?
No that I know of.

The reason behind sparse is that, if this function is shared,
it should shared by some header file and declared some where.

> The reason is that a declaration for such methods - which are usually
> bootstrap ones - can given the false impression of being used by some
> C code 'somewhere'.

Sparse does not care about who call those function, C code or asm code.
Sparse don't not actually link the program so it can't know this symbol is
actually externally used or not.

Personally, I don't see why you can't declare those functions even
if they are called from asm.

> Unfortunately the current `-Wno-decl' solution is a bit extreme: it
> turns off a very useful sparse feature (by design).

Right, the problem is that sparse can't tell which functions are used in
asm files and only skip warning on those.

Chris
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