violating function pointer signature

Peter Zijlstra
2020-11-18T13:22:35Z

On Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 03:34:51PM -0500, Steven Rostedt wrote:

> > > Since all tracepoints callbacks have at least one parameter (__data), we
> > > could declare tp_stub_func as:
> > >
> > > static void tp_stub_func(void *data, ...)
> > > {
> > > return;
> > > }
> > >
> > > And now C knows that tp_stub_func() can be called with one or more
> > > parameters, and had better be able to deal with it!
> >
> > AFAIU this won't work.
> >
> > C99 6.5.2.2 Function calls
> >
> > "If the function is defined with a type that is not compatible with the type (of the
> > expression) pointed to by the expression that denotes the called function, the behavior is
> > undefined."
>
> But is it really a problem in practice. I'm sure we could create an objtool
> function to check to make sure we don't break anything at build time.

I think that as long as the function is completely empty (it never
touches any of the arguments) this should work in practise.

That is:

void tp_nop_func(void) { }

can be used as an argument to any function pointer that has a void
return. In fact, I already do that, grep for __static_call_nop().

I'm not sure what the LLVM-CFI crud makes of it, but that's their
problem.