* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On Wed, 31 Dec 2008, Andrew Morton wrote: > > > > Adrian claimed that it was gcc-4.1.0 and 4.1.1 only. He proposed > > banning them: http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/8/5/444 > > If it really is just those releases, then yes, considering the number of > cases we apparently have, and considering how ugly it is in some cases > to move the weak function anywhere else, maybe banning those versions is > the proper thing to do. > > It probably won't hurt very many people - yeah, some people will be > forced to upgrade, but I have this memory of early 4.1 having had other > bugs anyway, so it's probably a good idea. That would be _really_ nice to do IMHO: in many cases putting the __weak definition into same-file scope with a call site is a natural approach. I think that's how we ended up having so many instances of that bug. When you use __weak as a 'default implementation' for some function, then it's very natural to put it into the same file that also uses it. It goes into separate, inactive scope only in a few special cases: such as when it's some library function that can be overriden by the architecture. But if it's some non-libray kernel code then the usage site is close to the definition site. If you look at most of the __weak fixes they IMO actually turned clean code into less clean code: they detached some natural clustering of definition and callsite. And __weak is very elegant IMO, it can avoid a lot of #ifdefs and can be used to self-document architecture interfaces - so it would be nice to make it always work, regardless of the callsite's scope. Ingo -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-parisc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
