Re: [PATCH v4] Makefile.compiler: replace cc-ifversion with compiler-specific macros

From: Nick Desaulniers
Date: Mon May 22 2023 - 15:52:48 EST


On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 9:52 AM Greg KH <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 12:09:34PM +0200, Ricardo Cañuelo wrote:
> > On vie, may 19 2023 at 08:57:24, Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > It could be; if the link order was changed, it's possible that this
> > > target may be hitting something along the lines of:
> > > https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/ctors#static-init-order i.e. the "static
> > > initialization order fiasco"
> > >
> > > I'm struggling to think of how this appears in C codebases, but I
> > > swear years ago I had a discussion with GKH (maybe?) about this. I
> > > think I was playing with converting Kbuild to use Ninja rather than
> > > Make; the resulting kernel image wouldn't boot because I had modified
> > > the order the object files were linked in. If you were to randomly
> > > shuffle the object files in the kernel, I recall some hazard that may
> > > prevent boot.
> >
> > I thought that was specifically a C++ problem? But then again, the
> > kernel docs explicitly say that the ordering of obj-y goals in kbuild is
> > significant in some instances [1]:
>
> Yes, it matters, you can not change it. If you do, systems will break.
> It is the only way we have of properly ordering our init calls within
> the same "level".

Ah, right it was the initcall ordering. Thanks for the reminder.

(There's a joke in there similar to the use of regexes to solve a
problem resulting in two new problems; initcalls have levels for
ordering, but we still have (unexpressed) dependencies between calls
of the same level; brittle!).

+Maksim, since that might be relevant info for the BOLT+Kernel work.

Ricardo,
https://elinux.org/images/e/e8/2020_ELCE_initcalls_myjosserand.pdf
mentions that there's a kernel command line param `initcall_debug`.
Perhaps that can be used to see if
5750121ae7382ebac8d47ce6d68012d6cd1d7926 somehow changed initcall
ordering, resulting in a config that cannot boot?
--
Thanks,
~Nick Desaulniers