On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 10:35 AM Josh Poimboeuf <jpoim...@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Peter suggested to try WRITE_ONCE for the two zero writes to see if that
> "fixes" it.
I'm sure it "fixes" it.
.. and then where else will we hit this?
It's one thing to turn a structure zeroing into "memset()", but some
places really can't do it.
We use "-ffreestanding" in some places to make sure that gcc doesn't
start calling random libc routines. I wonder if we need to make it a
general rule that it's done unconditionally.
Sadly, I think that ends up also disabling things like
"__builtin_memcpy()" and friends. Which we _do_ want to have access
to, because then gcc can inline the memcpy() when we _do_ use
memcpy().
We used to do all of those heuristics by hand, but wanted to let the
compiler do them for us.
So:
- we do want "memcpy()" to become "__builtin_memcpy()" which can then
be optimized to either individual inlined assignments _or_ to an
out-of-line call to memcpy().
- we do *not* want individual assignments to be randomly turned into
memset/memcpy(), because of various different reasons (including
function tracing, but also store tearing, yadda yadda)
Conceptually, "-ffreestanding" is definitely what a kernel needs, but
it has been *too* big of a hammer and disables real code generation,
iirc.
Linus
