On Wed, May 02, 2007 at 12:22:24AM -0700, David Rientjes wrote: > On Wed, 2 May 2007, Rusty Russell wrote: > > > That sounds exactly right to me! If the author says it's optional, it > > might be discarded. If they say it's needed, it won't be. At least, > > when I'm coding and gcc warns me something is unused, this is the > > decision I have to make ("is this really needed or not?"). > > > > Hi Rusty, > > There are many instances in the tree of functions that have no callers > whatsoever because they've been commented out temporarily, disabled > through configuration, etc. These are marked __attribute__ ((unused)) > right now so that the compiler doesn't emit a warning (and with gcc >=3.4 > it doesn't even emit code for them). What's __optional about these > functions if they have no callers? They're unused. So we cover all our > bases with __maybe_unused.
"many ... are marked __attribute__ ((unused))" is not true: $ grep -r __attribute_used__ * | wc -l 60 $ static inline functions don't result in warnings. And for global functions, it is technically impossible for gcc to figure out whether a function has any users. Unused static non-inline functions are the only functions resulting in warnings when being unused. If we don't want gcc to emit warnings for such, we could disable them globally. cu Adrian -- "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days. "Only a promise," Lao Er said. Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/