We have a fun problem and for a change it's not sparse fault. It's gcc folks' one. Basically, __attribute__((...)) behaves in an idiotic way and it's an intentional (and documented) behaviour. In declaration of form T __attribute__((foo)) **v; the attribute applies to v, not to **v. IOW, in that position it behaves (regardless of the nature of attribute) as storage class, not as a qualifier. Even if the same attribute can be used in T * __attribute__((foo)) *v; where it will apply to *v. Intended way to have it apply to **v is T (__attribute__((foo)) **v); To put it mildly, that blows. Note that qualifiers can *not* behave that way - direct declarator can not expand to (<qualifier> <something>). I.e. if you replace __attribute__((foo)) with qualifier in the above, you'll get invalid syntax. Now, that idiocy would be none of our concern, if not for the fact that noderef and address_space() are definitely supposed to imitate qualifiers. If anybody seriously suggests switching to syntax like int (__user *p); all over the place, well... Note that gcc rules for __attribute__() (and that's the only source of rules we _have_ for the damn thing) clearly say that int __user *p; is the same thing as int *__user p; Now, we could declare gcc people responsible for that turd rejects of Vogon Construction Fleet and handle the damn thing sanely. The first part is clearly the right thing to do, but the second one... Can't do without breaking gccisms using __attribute__. E.g. int (__attribute__((mode(__pointer__))) *p); is a gcc way to say "pointer to integer type equivalent to intptr_t" and int __attribute__((mode(__pointer__))) *p; is exactly the same thing as int *p; since the damn attribute applies to the entire type here (and is obviously a no-op). Frankly, I would rather add a new primitive (__qualifier__) mirroring the __attribute__, but acting like real qualifiers do. And switched the noderef et.al. to it. The only real alternative is to have __attribute__ behaviour dependent on its guts and that's not feasible - remember that there can be more than one attribute in the list insider the damn thing. Besides, it's bloody disgusting. And yes, I realize that it's an incompatible change, i.e. not a step to be taken lightly. Better ways out of that mess are more than welcome; I don't see any ;-/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-sparse" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
