From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Julia Lawall Subject: Re: [PATCH 19/20] drivers/net/ethernet/marvell/skge.c: fix error return code Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2012 10:08:47 +0200 (CEST) Message-ID: References: <20121004.142335.1467206545795435493.davem@davemloft.net> <20121004.145419.1859367129463136197.davem@davemloft.net> <1349395795.2008.26.camel@joe-AO722> <1349422595.2008.55.camel@joe-AO722> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Cc: Julia Lawall , David Miller , peter.senna@gmail.com, shemminger@vyatta.com, mlindner@marvell.com, kernel-janitors@vger.kernel.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org To: Joe Perches Return-path: In-Reply-To: <1349422595.2008.55.camel@joe-AO722> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org On Fri, 5 Oct 2012, Joe Perches wrote: > On Fri, 2012-10-05 at 07:22 +0200, Julia Lawall wrote: >> A tool was used to find a potential problem, and then Peter >> studied the code to see what fix was appropriate. > > Hi Julia. > > Was it true that a static analysis tool found the original > potential issue? If so, what tool was it? In the very beginning, I think that I found the problem in a patch when looking at patches that contain oopses. >>From that I wrote a Coccinelle rule. As Peter showed, the rule just produces a list of line numbers. The fix cannot easily be automated, because there are many cases where 0 is a valid error value. Some functions, for example, have their error value as a nonpositive integer. > But wasn't the scripted fix applied to the rest of the tree > robotically? No. Peter studied each case and considered what should be done, and then did that. I guess a potentially bad fix could have been applied automatically and then cleaned up manually, but considering the number of cases where the fix would be wrong, that seem like a bad idea. Also one might want to adapt a bit to local conventions about where the initialization should be added. julia