Re: [PATCH] scsi:NCR5380: remove same check condition in NCR5380_select

From: Julia Lawall
Date: Fri Aug 03 2018 - 05:52:56 EST




On Fri, 3 Aug 2018, Andy Shevchenko wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 5:24 AM, Finn Thain <fthain@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2 Aug 2018, zhong jiang wrote:
> >
> >> The same check condition is redundant, so remove one of them.
> >>
> >
> > If you are trying to find redundant code, your coccinelle script is
> > dangerously flawed.
>
> These days too many coccinelle helpers make people think they are
> doing right "clean ups" when in the practice they bring the
> regressions.
>
> Julia, is possible by coccinelle to distinguish memory accesses versus
> I/O? At least it would increase robustness in some cases.

With make coccicheck, the semantic patch should already emit the warning:

//# A common source of false positives is when the argument performs a side
//# effect.

I can modify the rule so that it doesn't report on code that involves
function calls. It could lose some desirable warnings, where the function
call is just a wrapper for eg extracting some field, but it is probably
safer in practice.

julia