Johannes Weiner writes:
I would ack a patch that adds __maybe_unused. This is a tiny function. If we keep it around a few releases after removing the last user, it costs us absolutely nothing. Eventually somebody will notice and send a patch to remove it. No big deal. There is, however, real cost in keeping bogus warnings around and telling people to ignore them. It's actively lowering the signal-to-noise ratio and normalizing warnings to developers. That's the kind of thing that will actually hide problems in the kernel. We know that the function can be unused in certain scenarios. It's silly to let the compiler continue to warn about it. That's exactly what __maybe_unused is for, so let's use it here.
Yeah, this is exactly what I was trying to express in the first one[0]. The fact that this patch came around a second time, as expected, just solidifies my concern around the waste to human time.
I would also ack a patch that adds __maybe_unused. 0: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20191217143720.GB131030@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
