Re: [RFC PATCH] explicitly mark recursion count

Jörn Engel
2004-06-02T15:28:12Z

On Wed, 2 June 2004 08:12:00 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Jun 2004, Jörn Engel wrote:
> >
> > Can I read this as:
> > Linus himself will use strong words to enforce all recursions in the
> > kernel to be either removed or properly documented.
>
> If we have a good detector that is reliable and easy to run, why not?

Great! So the official format to document recursions is plain english
for human readers?

> It will take some time, but I think the problem so far has been that the
> recursion can be hard to see. Some "core" cases are well-known (memory
> allocations during memory allocation, and filename lookup), and they
> should be trivial to annotate. Knock wood. Others might be worse.

For sure. There are some functions with multiple recursions around
them, real fun! :)

> > In that case, you have 273 recursions to deal with. They are all in
> > the data I attached a few posts back. Recursions would basically be
> > in the same league as huge stack hogs, sounds good.
>
> Yes. And with huge stack hogs, we've not exactly "fixed them all in a
> weekend", have we? But having a few people run the checking tools and
> nagging every once in a while ends up eventually fixing things. At least
> the most common ones.

s/a few people/Jörn/

Legal reasons. I'll try to do this from time to time.

Jörn

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