Re: [PATCH 1/2] futex: mark futex_detect_cmpxchg() as 'noinline'

From: Joe Perches
Date: Thu Mar 07 2019 - 12:43:22 EST


On Thu, 2019-03-07 at 17:25 +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux admin wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 07, 2019 at 09:19:04AM -0800, Joe Perches wrote:
> > On Thu, 2019-03-07 at 10:14 +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > > On 32-bit ARM, I got a link failure in futex_init() when building
> > > with clang in some random configurations:
> > >
> > > kernel/futex.o:(.text.fixup+0x5c): relocation truncated to fit: R_ARM_JUMP24 against `.init.text'
> > >
> > > As far as I can tell, the problem is that a branch is over 16MB
> > > apart in those configurations, but only if it branches back to
> > > the init text.
> > >
> > > Marking the futex_detect_cmpxchg() function as noinline and
> > > not __init avoids the problem for me.
> >
> > Perhaps the __init and __exit #defines should be noinline
> > to allow discarding of the code.
>
> How does that help this case?

It doesn't particularly.
It does help any other case that might arise.

> It seems to me to be completely sane to have:
>
> static void __init foo(...)
> {
> }
>
> static int __init foo_init(...)
> {
> foo();
> }
>
> and have the expectation that the compiler _can_, if it desires, inline
> foo() into foo_init().

True, but init function performance requirements are
generally trivial and isolating the possibility of
defects like this seems a reasonable trade-off to me.