Re: typeof and operands in named address spaces

[Segher Boessenkool <segher@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 01:47:13PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> 
> + lots of people and linux-toolchains
> 
> On Wed, Nov 04, 2020 at 07:31:42PM +0100, Uros Bizjak wrote:
> > Hello!
> > 
> > I was looking at the recent linux patch series [1] where segment
> > qualifiers (named address spaces) were introduced to handle percpu
> > variables. In the patch [2], the author mentions that:
> > 
> > --q--
> > Unfortunately, gcc does not provide a way to remove segment
> > qualifiers, which is needed to use typeof() to create local instances
> > of the per-cpu variable. For this reason, do not use the segment
> > qualifier for per-cpu variables, and do casting using the segment
> > qualifier instead.
> > --/q--
> 
> C in general does not provide means to strip qualifiers.

Most ways you can try to use the result are undefined behaviour, even.

> We recently had
> a _lot_ of 'fun' trying to strip volatile from a type, see here:
> 
>   https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/875zimp0ay.fsf@mpe.ellerman.id.au
> 
> which resulted in the current __unqual_scalar_typeof() hack.
> 
> If we're going to do compiler extentions here, can we pretty please have
> a sane means of modifying qualifiers in general?

What do you want to do with it?  It may be more feasible to do a
compiler extension for *that*.


Segher