On Fri, Mar 11, 2022 at 6:27 AM Daniel Thompson <daniel.thompson@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > It is possible simply to use spelling to help uncover errors in > list_traverse()? I'd love to, and thought that would be a lovely idea, but in another thread ("") Barnabás Pőcze pointed out that we actually have a fair number of cases where the list member entries are embedded in internal structures and have a '.' in them: https://lore.kernel.org/all/wKlkWvCGvBrBjshT6gHT23JY9kWImhFPmTKfZWtN5Bkv_OtIFHTy7thr5SAEL6sYDthMDth-rvFETX-gCZPPCb9t2bO1zilj0Q-OTTSbe00=@protonmail.com/ which means that you can't actually append the target_member name except in the simplest cases, because it wouldn't result in one single identifier. Otherwise it would be a lovely idea. > For architectures without HAVE_LD_DEAD_CODE_DATA_ELIMINATION then the > "obvious" extension of list_traversal_head() ends up occupying bss > space. Even replacing the pointer with a zero length array is still > provoking gcc-11 (arm64) to allocate a byte from bss (often with a lot > of padding added). I think compilers give objects at least one byte of space, so that two different objects get different addresses, and don't compare equal. That said, I'm not seeing your issue. list_traversal_head() is a union, and always has that 'struct list_head' in it, and that's the biggest part of the union. IOW, the other parts are (a) never used for anything but their type and (b) will not take up any new space that isn't already used by the list_head itself. Linus