On Saturday 05 July 2008 00:01, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > We also jump through hoops to print things like sector_t and
> > > resource_size_t. They always need to be cast to `unsiged long long',
> > > which generates additional stack space and text in some setups.
> >
> > The thing is that GCC checks types. So it's fine to add "print this
> > pointer specially", but you can't in general add new printf arguments
> > without also hacking GCC. Unless you use -Wno-format, and require
> > sparse to check special kernel types.
>
> It would be excellent if gcc had an extension system so that you could
> add new printf control chars and maybe even tell gcc how to check them.
> But of course, if that were to happen, we couldn't use it for 4-5 years.
>
> What I had initially proposed was to abuse %S, which takes a wchar_t*.
> gcc accepts `unsigned long *' for %S.
>
> Then, we put the kernel-specific control char after the S, so we can
> print an inode (rofl) with
>
> struct inode *inode;
>
> printk("here is an inode: %Si\n", (unsigned long *)inode);
>
> Downsides are:
>
> - there's a cast, so you could accidentally do
>
> printk("here is an inode: %Si\n", (unsigned long *)dentry);
>
> - there's a cast, and they're ugly
>
> - gcc cannot of course check that the arg matches the control string
>
> Unfortunately (and this seems weird), gcc printf checking will not
> accept a void* for %S: it _has_ to be wchar_t*, and the checker won't
> permit void* substitution for that.
Repeating myself here...
We can add an alternative alias to printk:
asmlinkage int printk(const char * fmt, ...)
__attribute__ ((format (printf, 1, 2))) __cold;
+asmlinkage int custom_printk(const char * fmt, ...) __cold asm ("printk");
custom_printk() is actually just printk(), that is,
we won't need additional function, we need to teach
*printk* about MAC addresses, NIPQUADs etc;
and then use printk() if you use only standard %fmt (and have it
checked by gcc), or use custom_printk() if you have non-standard
%fmt in the format string.
The only downside that in second case, you lose gcc checking.
No big deal.
--
vda
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