Re: [patch] CFS scheduler, -v8

Johannes Stezenbach
2007-05-07T18:39:38Z

On Mon, May 07, 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, 7 May 2007, Esben Nielsen wrote:
> >
> > What is (long)(a-b) ? I have tried to look it up in the C99 standeard but I
> > can't find it. Maybe it is in the referred LIA-1 standeard, which I can't find
> > with google.

C99 defines unsigned overflow semantics, but it doesn't say anything
about signed overflow, thus it's undefined -- and you have a hard
time finding it out.

However, I have no clue *why* it's undefined and not
implementation defined. Does someone know?

> I don't worry about non-2's-complement machines (they don't exist, and
> likely won't exist in the future either).

I think DSPs can do saturated arithmetics (clamp to min/max
values instead of wrap around). Not that it matters for Linux...

> So I worry about compilers rewriting my code.

gcc has -fwrapv and -ftrapv to change signed integer overflow
behaviour.

One baffling example where gcc rewrites code is when
conditionals depend on signed integer overflow:

$ cat xx.c
#include <assert.h>

int foo(int a)
{
assert(a + 100 > a);
return a;
}

int bar(int a)
{
if (a + 100 > a)
a += 100;
return a;
}
$ gcc -Wall -Wextra -fomit-frame-pointer -c xx.c
$ objdump -dr xx.o

xx.o: file format elf32-i386

Disassembly of section .text:

00000000 <foo>:
0: 8b 44 24 04 mov 0x4(%esp),%eax
4: c3 ret

00000005 <bar>:
5: 83 44 24 04 64 addl $0x64,0x4(%esp)
a: 8b 44 24 04 mov 0x4(%esp),%eax
e: c3 ret

The assert and the condition were just dropped
by gcc -- without any warning.

gcc-4.2 will add -fstrict-overflow and -Wstrict-overflow.
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/changes.html

Johannes