Re: [PATCH] [v2] Kbuild: move to -std=gnu11

Nick Desaulniers
2022-02-28T21:04:06Z

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 2:32 AM Arnd Bergmann <arnd@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> From: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
>
> During a patch discussion, Linus brought up the option of changing
> the C standard version from gnu89 to gnu99, which allows using variable
> declaration inside of a for() loop. While the C99, C11 and later standards
> introduce many other features, most of these are already available in
> gnu89 as GNU extensions as well.
>
> An earlier attempt to do this when gcc-5 started defaulting to
> -std=gnu11 failed because at the time that caused warnings about
> designated initializers with older compilers. Now that gcc-5.1 is the
> minimum compiler version used for building kernels, that is no longer a
> concern. Similarly, the behavior of 'inline' functions changes between

More precisely, the semantics of "extern inline" functions changed
between ISO C90 and ISO C99.

That's the only concern I have, which I doubt is an issue. The kernel
is already covered by the function attribute as you note.

Just to have some measure:
$ git grep -rn "extern inline" | wc -l
116

Most of those are in arch/alpha/ which is curious; I wonder if those
were intentional.

(I do worry about Makefiles that completely reset KBUILD_CFLAGS
though; the function attributes still take precedence).

> gnu89 and gnu11, but this was taken care of by defining 'inline' to
> include __attribute__((gnu_inline)) in order to allow building with
> clang a while ago.
>
> One minor issue that remains is an added gcc warning for shifts of
> negative integers when building with -Werror, which happens with the
> 'make W=1' option, as well as for three drivers in the kernel that always
> enable -Werror, but it was only observed with the i915 driver so far.
> To be on the safe side, add -Wno-shift-negative-value to any -Wextra
> in a Makefile.
>
> Nathan Chancellor reported an additional -Wdeclaration-after-statement
> warning that appears in a system header on arm, this still needs a
> workaround.

Ack; I think we can just fix this in clang.

>
> The differences between gnu99, gnu11, gnu1x and gnu17 are fairly
> minimal and mainly impact warnings at the -Wpedantic level that the
> kernel never enables. Between these, gnu11 is the newest version
> that is supported by all supported compiler versions, though it is
> only the default on gcc-5, while all other supported versions of
> gcc or clang default to gnu1x/gnu17.

I agree. With the fixup to s/Werror/Wextra.

Reviewed-by: Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>

>
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wiyCH7xeHcmiFJ-YgXUy2Jaj7pnkdKpcovt8fYbVFW3TA@mail.gmail.com/
> Link: https://github.com/ClangBuiltLinux/linux/issues/1603
> Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
> Cc: Masahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>
> Cc: linux-kbuild@vger.kernel.org
> Cc: llvm@lists.linux.dev
> Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>

--
Thanks,
~Nick Desaulniers