Re: gcc7 log2 compile issues in kernel/time/timekeeping.c

Ard Biesheuvel
2017-02-25T11:50:57Z

> On 25 Feb 2017, at 11:23, Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@linaro.org> wrote:
>
> On 25 February 2017 at 11:09, Markus Trippelsdorf
> <markus@trippelsdorf.de> wrote:
>> On 2017.02.25 at 09:11 +0000, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
>>>> On 25 February 2017 at 08:18, Markus Trippelsdorf <markus@trippelsdorf.de> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Why not simply get rid of the ____ilog2_NaN thing altogether?
>>>>
>>>
>>> That would remove the issue, sure. But we lose an opportunity to spot
>>> incorrect code at compile time.
>>
>> In the case of kernel/time/timekeeping.c it is clearly a false positive.
>> Was ever incorrect code spotted by ____ilog2_NaN in the past?
>>
>>> My concern is that it by not pushing back on changes to the semantics
>>> of __builtin_constant_p() such as this one, we may start seeing other
>>> issues where we can no longer use it, and we lose a very useful tool.
>>
>> We had a long discussion in:
>> https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=72785
>> As you can see there is no real consensus.
>> But ilog2 seems to be the only place where this ever popped up.
>> (There were several distro-wide mass rebuilds with gcc-7 and no other
>> __builtin_constant_p() issue was found yet.)
>>
>
> Well, given that it is really dead code that is being emitted, and
> that log2(0) is really undefined, perhaps we should simply replace
> ilog2_NaN() with __builtin_unreachable()?

... or perhaps it is better to just pass the constant == 0 to the runtime implementation?

The second ilog2_NaN is really unreachable, given that it deals with unsigned values >0 without a single bit set.