On Sat, Oct 22, 2022 at 11:16:33AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Fri, Oct 21, 2022 at 11:06 PM Gabriel Paubert <paubert@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > Ok, I´ve just tried it, except that I had something slightly different in > > mind, but perhaps should have been clearer in my first post. > > > > I have change your code to the following: > > I actually tested that, but using a slightly different version, and my > non-union test case ended up like > > size_t strlen(const char *p) > { > return __builtin_strlen(p); > } > > and then gcc actually complains about > > warning: infinite recursion detected > > and I (incorrectly) thought this was unworkable. But your version > seems to work fine. Incidentally, it also gives exactly the same code with -ffreestanding. > > So yeah, for the kernel I think we could do something like this. It's > ugly, but it gets rid of the crazy warning. Not as ugly as casts IMO, and it's localized in a few header files. However, it does not solve the problem of assigning a constant string to an u8 *; I've no idea on how to fix that. > > Practically speaking this might be a bit painful, because we've got > several different variations of this all due to all the things like > our debugging versions (see <linux/fortify-string.h> for example), so > some of our code is this crazy jungle of "with this config, use this > wrapper". I've just had a look at that code, and I don't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. If someone else to get his hands dirty... Gabriel > > But if somebody wants to deal with the '-Wpointer-sign' warnings, > there does seem to be a way out. Maybe with another set of helper > macros, creating those odd __transparent_union__ wrappers might even > end up reasonable. > > It's not like we don't have crazy macros for function wrappers > elsewhere (the SYSCALL macros come to mind - shudder). The macros > themselves may be a nasty horror, but when done right the _use_ point > of said macros can be nice and clean. > > Linus