Traditionally, we have always had warnings about uninitialized variables
enabled, as this is part of -Wall, and generally a good idea [1], but it
also always produced false positives, mainly because this is a variation
of the halting problem and provably impossible to get right in all cases
[2].
Various people have identified cases that are particularly bad for false
positives, and in commit e74fc973b6 ("Turn off -Wmaybe-uninitialized
when building with -Os"), I turned off the warning for any build that
was done with CC_OPTIMIZE_FOR_SIZE. This drastically reduced the number
of false positive warnings in the default build but unfortunately had
the side effect of turning the warning off completely in 'allmodconfig'
builds, which in turn led to a lot of warnings (both actual bugs, and
remaining false positives) to go in unnoticed.
With commit 877417e6ff ("Kbuild: change CC_OPTIMIZE_FOR_SIZE
definition") enabled the warning again for allmodconfig builds in v4.7
and in v4.8-rc1, I had finally managed to address all warnings I get in
an ARM allmodconfig build and most other maybe-uninitialized warnings
for ARM randconfig builds.
However, commit 6e8d666e92 ("Disable "maybe-uninitialized" warning
globally") was merged at the same time and disabled it completely for
all configurations, because of false-positive warnings on x86 that I had
not addressed until then. This caused a lot of actual bugs to get
merged into mainline, and I sent several dozen patches for these during
the v4.9 development cycle. Most of these are actual bugs, some are for
correct code that is safe because it is only called under external
constraints that make it impossible to run into the case that gcc sees,
and in a few cases gcc is just stupid and finds something that can
obviously never happen.
I have now done a few thousand randconfig builds on x86 and collected
all patches that I needed to address every single warning I got (I can
provide the combined patch for the other warnings if anyone is
interested), so I hope we can get the warning back and let people catch
the actual bugs earlier.
This reverts the change to disable the warning completely and for now
brings it back at the "make W=1" level, so we can get it merged into
mainline without introducing false positives. A follow-up patch enables
it on all levels unless some configuration option turns it off because
of false-positives.
Link: https://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=232 [1]
Link: https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Better_Uninitialized_Warnings [2]
Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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