Re: The sheer number of sparse warnings in the kernel

Josh Boyer
2014-02-27T01:19:52Z

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 6:37 PM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com> wrote:
> 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...

Fedora rawhide has sparse-0.5.0-1.fc21. If it matters, we could
probably update F20 and F19 with that.

josh