Nouveau - Nov 2020 - [Intel-wired-lan] [PATCH 000/141] Fix fall-through warnings for Clang

On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 11:05 PM James Bottomley
<James.Bottomley at hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2020-11-24 at 13:32 -0800, Kees Cook wrote:
> > We already enable -Wimplicit-fallthrough globally, so that's not
the
> > discussion. The issue is that Clang is (correctly) even more strict
> > than GCC for this, so these are the remaining ones to fix for full
> > Clang coverage too.
> >
> > People have spent more time debating this already than it would have
> > taken to apply the patches. :)
>
> You mean we've already spent 90% of the effort to come this far so we
> might as well go the remaining 10% because then at least we get some
> return? It's certainly a clinching argument in defence procurement ...
So developers and distributions using Clang can't have
-Wimplicit-fallthrough enabled because GCC is less strict (which has
been shown in this thread to lead to bugs)?  We'd like to have nice
things too, you know.

I even agree that most of the churn comes from

case 0:
  ++x;
default:
  break;

which I have a patch for: https://reviews.llvm.org/D91895.  I agree
that can never lead to bugs.  But that's not the sole case of this
series, just most of them.

Though, note how the reviewer (C++ spec editor and clang front end
owner) in https://reviews.llvm.org/D91895 even asks in that review how
maybe a new flag would be more appropriate for a watered
down/stylistic variant of the existing behavior.  And if the current
wording of Documentation/process/deprecated.rst around "fallthrough"
is a straightforward rule of thumb, I kind of agree with him.
>
> > This is about robustness and language wrangling. It's a big code-
> > base, and this is the price of our managing technical debt for
> > permanent robustness improvements. (The numbers I ran from
Gustavo's
> > earlier patches were that about 10% of the places adjusted were
> > identified as legitimate bugs being fixed. This final series may be
> > lower, but there are still bugs being found from it -- we need to
> > finish this and shut the door on it for good.)
>
> I got my six patches by analyzing the lwn.net report of the fixes that
> was cited which had 21 of which 50% didn't actually change the emitted
> code, and 25% didn't have a user visible effect.
>
> But the broader point I'm making is just because the compiler people
> come up with a shiny new warning doesn't necessarily mean the problem
That's not what this is though; you're attacking a strawman.  I'd
encourage you to bring that up when that actually occurs, unlike this
case since it's actively hindering getting -Wimplicit-fallthrough
enabled for Clang.  This is not a shiny new warning; it's already on
for GCC and has existed in both compilers for multiple releases.

And I'll also note that warnings are warnings and not errors because
they cannot be proven to be bugs in 100% of cases, but they have led
to bugs in the past.  They require a human to review their intent and
remove ambiguities.  If 97% of cases would end in a break ("Expert C
Programming: Deep C Secrets" - Peter van der Linden), then it starts
to look to me like a language defect; certainly an incorrectly chosen
default.  But the compiler can't know those 3% were intentional,
unless you're explicit for those exceptional cases.
> it's detecting is one that causes us actual problems in the code base.
> I'd really be happier if we had a theory about what classes of CVE or
> bug we could eliminate before we embrace the next new warning.
We don't generally file CVEs and waiting for them to occur might be
too reactive, but I agree that pointing to some additional
documentation in commit messages about how a warning could lead to a
bug would make it clearer to reviewers why being able to enable it
treewide, even if there's no bug in their particular subsystem, is in
the general interest of the commons.

On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 7:58 AM James Bottomley
<James.Bottomley at hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
>
> We're also complaining about the inability to recruit maintainers:
>
>
https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/30/hard_to_find_linux_maintainers_says_torvalds/
>
> And burn out:
>
> http://antirez.com/news/129
>
> The whole crux of your argument seems to be maintainers' time isn't
> important so we should accept all trivial patches ... I'm pushing back
> on that assumption in two places, firstly the valulessness of the time
> and secondly that all trivial patches are valuable.
It's critical to the longevity of any open source project that there
are not single points of failure.  If someone is not expendable or
replaceable (or claims to be) then that's a risk to the project and a
bottleneck.  Not having a replacement in training or some form of
redundancy is short sighted.

If trivial patches are adding too much to your workload, consider
training a co-maintainer or asking for help from one of your reviewers
whom you trust.  I don't doubt it's hard to find maintainers, but
existing maintainers should go out of their way to entrust
co-maintainers especially when they find their workload becomes too
high.  And reviewing/picking up trivial patches is probably a great
way to get started.  If we allow too much knowledge of any one
subsystem to collect with one maintainer, what happens when that
maintainer leaves the community (which, given a finite lifespan, is an
inevitability)?
-- 
Thanks,
~Nick Desaulniers

On Wed, 25 Nov 2020 04:24:27 -0800 Nick Desaulniers
wrote:
> I even agree that most of the churn comes from
> 
> case 0:
>   ++x;
> default:
>   break;
And just to spell it out,

case ENUM_VALUE1:
	bla();
	break;
case ENUM_VALUE2:
	bla();
default:
	break;

is a fairly idiomatic way of indicating that not all values of the enum
are expected to be handled by the switch statement. 

I really hope the Clang folks are reasonable and merge your patch.
> If trivial patches are adding too much to your workload, consider
> training a co-maintainer or asking for help from one of your reviewers
> whom you trust.  I don't doubt it's hard to find maintainers, but
> existing maintainers should go out of their way to entrust
> co-maintainers especially when they find their workload becomes too
> high.  And reviewing/picking up trivial patches is probably a great
> way to get started.  If we allow too much knowledge of any one
> subsystem to collect with one maintainer, what happens when that
> maintainer leaves the community (which, given a finite lifespan, is an
> inevitability)?
The burn out point is about enjoying your work and feeling that it
matters. It really doesn't make much difference if you're doing
something you don't like for 12 hours every day or only in shifts with
another maintainer. You'll dislike it either way.

Applying a real patch set and then getting a few follow ups the next day
for trivial coding things like fallthrough missing or static missing,
just because I didn't have the full range of compilers to check with
before applying makes me feel pretty shitty, like I'm not doing a good
job. YMMV.

On Wed, 25 Nov 2020, Nick Desaulniers wrote:
> So developers and distributions using Clang can't have 
> -Wimplicit-fallthrough enabled because GCC is less strict (which has 
> been shown in this thread to lead to bugs)?  We'd like to have nice 
> things too, you know.
> 
Apparently the GCC developers don't want you to have "nice things"
either.
Do you think that the kernel should drop gcc in favour of clang?
Or do you think that a codebase can somehow satisfy multiple checkers and 
their divergent interpretations of the language spec?
> This is not a shiny new warning; it's already on for GCC and has
existed
> in both compilers for multiple releases.
> 
Perhaps you're referring to the compiler feature that lead to the 
ill-fated, tree-wide /* fallthrough */ patch series.

When the ink dries on the C23 language spec and the implementations figure 
out how to interpret it then sure, enforce the warning for new code -- the 
cost/benefit analysis is straight forward. However, the case for patching 
existing mature code is another story.

On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 8:24 AM Jakub Kicinski <kuba at kernel.org>
wrote:
>
> Applying a real patch set and then getting a few follow ups the next day
> for trivial coding things like fallthrough missing or static missing,
> just because I didn't have the full range of compilers to check with
> before applying makes me feel pretty shitty, like I'm not doing a good
> job. YMMV.
I understand. Everyone feels that way, except maybe Bond villains and
robots.  My advice in that case is don't take it personally.  We're
working with a language that's more error prone relative to others.
While one would like to believe they are flawless, over time they
can't beat the aggregate statistics.  A balance between Imposter
Syndrome and Dunning Kruger is walked by all software developers, and
the fear of making mistakes in public is one of the number one reasons
folks don't take the plunge contributing to open source software or
even the kernel.  My advice to them is "don't sweat the small
stuff."
-- 
Thanks,
~Nick Desaulniers