Re: [PATCH] lib/string: shrink lib/string.i via IWYU

Nick Desaulniers
2023-12-11T20:48:00Z

On Tue, Dec 5, 2023 at 1:44 PM Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Dec 05, 2023 at 01:39:47PM -0800, Nick Desaulniers wrote:
>
> > The tooling Tanzir is working on does wrap IWYU, and does support such
> > mapping (of 'low level' to 'high level' headers; more so, if it
> > recommends X you can override to suggest Y instead).
> >
> > arch/nios/ also doesn't provide a bug.h, which this patch is
> > suggesting we include directly. I guess the same goes for
> > asm/rwonce.h.
>
> See include/asm-generic/Kbuild:
> mandatory-y += bug.h
> ...
> mandatory-y += rwonce.h
>
> IOW, sh will have asm/bug.h and as/rwonce.h copied from asm-generic.
>
> Still, includes of asm/*.h had been a massive headache historically
> and breeding more of those shouldn't be overdone.
>
> More painful problem is arch- and config-dependent stuff, though...

Ah, it looks like include/uapi/asm-generic/Kbuild also makes use of
this pattern using mandatory-y.

So I think we can handle this as a two step translation. We can tell
the tooling to 'nevermind recommending X, always replace
recommendations for X with Y <for raisins>', so:
1. any recommendation to use asm-generic/foo.h should be replaced with
asm/foo.h (always, based on those 2 Kbuild files, could autogenerate)
2. some recommendations to use asm/foo.h should be replaced with
linux/foo.h (not necessarily codified anywhere; depends on if there is
a linux/foo.h, will manually curate this list for now)

Orthogonal but some places in tree can be cleaned up to include
linux/foo.h rather than asm/foo.h.

Does this sound like an improvement to my mental model of the
conventions used for kernel header inclusion within the linux kernel?

Tanzir nearly has the above done (for 1, 2 we will probably need to
iterate on more). We've also beefed up our local testing to test more
architectures. I expect Tanzir to send a v2 of this patch (as a
series, with the fix for ARCH=sh) later this week, if the above seems
correct.
--
Thanks,
~Nick Desaulniers