Re: [PATCH v1 3/3] checkpatch: warn on usage of VM_BUG_ON() and other BUG variants

Joe Perches
2022-09-23T02:12:02Z

On Thu, 2022-09-22 at 19:05 -0700, John Hubbard wrote:
> On 9/20/22 05:23, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> > checkpatch does not point out that VM_BUG_ON() and friends should be
> > avoided, however, Linus notes:
> >
> > VM_BUG_ON() has the exact same semantics as BUG_ON. It is literally
> > no different, the only difference is "we can make the code smaller
> > because these are less important". [1]
> >
> > So let's warn on VM_BUG_ON() and other BUG variants as well. While at it,
> > make it clearer that the kernel really shouldn't be crashed.
> >
> > As there are some subsystem BUG macros that actually don't end up crashing
> > the kernel -- for example, KVM_BUG_ON() -- exclude these manually.
> >
> > [1] https://lore.kernel.org/r/CAHk-=wg40EAZofO16Eviaj7mfqDhZ2gVEbvfsMf6gYzspRjYvw@mail.gmail.com
[]
> > diff --git a/scripts/checkpatch.pl b/scripts/checkpatch.pl
[]
> > @@ -4695,12 +4695,12 @@ sub process {
> > }
> > }
> >
> > -# avoid BUG() or BUG_ON()
> > - if ($line =~ /\b(?:BUG|BUG_ON)\b/) {
> > +# do not use BUG() or variants
> > + if ($line =~ /\b(?!AA_|BUILD_|DCCP_|IDA_|KVM_|RWLOCK_|snd_|SPIN_)(?:[a-zA-Z_]*_)?BUG(?:_ON)?(?:_[A-Z_]+)?\s*\(/) {
>
> Should this be a separate patch? Adding a bunch of exceptions to the BUG() rules is
> a separate and distinct thing from adding VM_BUG_ON() and other *BUG*() variants to
> the mix.

Not in my opinion.

> > my $msg_level = \&WARN;
> > $msg_level = \&CHK if ($file);
> > &{$msg_level}("AVOID_BUG",
> > - "Avoid crashing the kernel - try using WARN_ON & recovery code rather than BUG() or BUG_ON()\n" . $herecurr);
> > + "Do not crash the kernel unless it is unavoidable - use WARN_ON_ONCE & recovery code (if reasonable) rather than BUG() or variants.\n" . $herecurr);
>
> Here's a requested tweak, to clean up the output and fix punctuation:
>
> "Avoid crashing the kernel--use WARN_ON_ONCE() plus recovery code (if feasible) instead of BUG() or variants.\n" . $herecurr);

Fixing punctuation here would be removing the trailing period as checkpatch
only has periods for multi-sentence output messages.

And I think that "Do not crash" is a stronger statement than "Avoid crashing"
so I prefer the original suggestion but it's not a big deal either way.