Re: The sheer number of sparse warnings in the kernel

H. Peter Anvin
2014-02-26T23:37:27Z

On 02/26/2014 03:31 PM, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> On 02/26/2014 03:29 PM, Greg KH wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 03:28:59PM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
>>> On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 02:49:26PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>>>> The number of sparse errors in the current kernel is staggering, and it
>>>> makes sparse a lot less valuable of a tool that it otherwise could be.
>>>> On a build of x86-64 allyesconfig I'm getting 20,676 sparse messages.
>>>> Out of those, 12,358 come from linux/err.h. Given that the latter
>>>> basically spams *everything*, I can only conclude that almost noone uses
>>>> sparse unless they have a filter script.
>>>
>>> What errors are you seeing from err.h? I don't see those when building
>>> different subdirectories with sparse (which is how I normally use it.)
>>>
>>> And what version of sparse are you running:
>>> $ sparse --version
>>> v0.4.5-rc1-407-g345e8943fc36
>>
>> Ah, 0.5.0 is now out, maybe you should update to that version?
>>
>
> Yes... it looks like the 0.4.5-rc1 that shipped in Fedora is indeed out
> of date. With 0.5.0 I "only" see 8,207 messages, which means that at
> least the linux/err.h issue is gone.
>

For what it's worth, the rpm is called sparse-0.4.5.rc1-2.fc19.x86_64
and sparse --version reports 0.4.4...

-hpa