Hi Josh, I was thinking lately about sparse's context checking. I had an idea and I wondered if it hasn't already been tried or discussed. The context checking essentially works with the instruction OP_CONTEXT, that do nothing more than adding or subtracting some constant value to 'the context'. Then, at checking time, these instructions are interpreted along all the paths and if there is a disagreement between values from different paths, it emits a 'context imbalance' warning (there is also the checks for the expected return value of the context). My idea/question is the following: this interpretation is already done for all 'normal' values. So couldn't we consider the context as a special kind of 'variable', use a normal pseudo for it, use phi-nodes on them and let the normal simplification process act on them? If the context is (proveably) well balanced, there shouldn't be any phi-node left for this context. I'm not sure if there would be any significant advantage, but it seems to me that what is currently done is somehow redundant with the 'normal' processing. It could also maybe help to have several independent contexts. [of course, we can't really use add/sub for the context increase/decrease as we want to check if the context don't become negative]. Best regards, -- Luc -- 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
