The code in question is modifying a variable declared const through
pointer manipulation. Such code is explicitly undefined behavior, and
is the lone issue preventing malta_defconfig from booting when built
with Clang:
If an attempt is made to modify an object defined with a const-qualified
type through use of an lvalue with non-const-qualified type, the
behavior is undefined.
LLVM is removing such assignments. A simple fix is to not declare
variables const that you plan on modifying. Limiting the scope would be
a better method of preventing unwanted writes to such a variable.
Further, the code in question mentions "compiler bugs" without any links
to bug reports, so it is difficult to know if the issue is resolved in
GCC. The patch was authored in 2006, which would have been GCC 4.0.3 or
4.1.1. The minimal supported version of GCC in the Linux kernel is
currently 4.6.
For what its worth, there was UB before the commit in question, it just
added a barrier and got lucky IRT codegen. I don't think there's any
actual compiler bugs related, just runtime bugs due to UB.
Link: https://github.com/ClangBuiltLinux/linux/issues/610
Fixes: 966f4406d9 ("[MIPS] Work around bad code generation for <asm/io.h>.")
Reported-by: Nathan Chancellor <natechancellor@gmail.com>
Debugged-by: Nathan Chancellor <natechancellor@gmail.com>
Suggested-by: Eli Friedman <efriedma@quicinc.com>
Signed-off-by: Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Nathan Chancellor <natechancellor@gmail.com>
Tested-by: Nathan Chancellor <natechancellor@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul Burton <paul.burton@mips.com>
Cc: ralf@linux-mips.org
Cc: jhogan@kernel.org
Cc: Maciej W. Rozycki <macro@linux-mips.org>
Cc: Hassan Naveed <hnaveed@wavecomp.com>
Cc: Stephen Kitt <steve@sk2.org>
Cc: Serge Semin <fancer.lancer@gmail.com>
Cc: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: linux-mips@vger.kernel.org
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Cc: clang-built-linux@googlegroups.com
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