• Linus Torvalds's avatar
    minmax: avoid overly complex min()/max() macro arguments in xen · e8432ac8
    Linus Torvalds authored
    
    
    We have some very fancy min/max macros that have tons of sanity checking
    to warn about mixed signedness etc.
    
    This is all things that a sane compiler should warn about, but there are
    no sane compiler interfaces for this, and '-Wsign-compare' is broken [1]
    and not useful.
    
    So then we compensate (some would say over-compensate) by doing the
    checks manually with some truly horrid macro games.
    
    And no, we can't just use __builtin_types_compatible_p(), because the
    whole question of "does it make sense to compare these two values" is a
    lot more complicated than that.
    
    For example, it makes a ton of sense to compare unsigned values with
    simple constants like "5", even if that is indeed a signed type.  So we
    have these very strange macros to try to make sensible type checking
    decisions on the arguments to 'min()' and 'max()'.
    
    But that can cause enormous code expansion if the min()/max() macros are
    used with complicated expressions, and particularly if you nest these
    things so that you get the first big expansion then expanded again.
    
    The xen setup.c file ended up ballooning to over 50MB of preprocessed
    noise that takes 15s to compile (obviously depending on the build host),
    largely due to one single line.
    
    So let's split that one single line to just be simpler.  I think it ends
    up being more legible to humans too at the same time.  Now that single
    file compiles in under a second.
    Reported-and-reviewed-by: default avatarLorenzo Stoakes <lorenzo.stoakes@oracle.com>
    Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/c83c17bb-be75-4c67-979d-54eee38774c6@lucifer.local/
    Link: https://staticthinking.wordpress.com/2023/07/25/wsign-compare-is-garbage/
    
     [1]
    Cc: David Laight <David.Laight@aculab.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    e8432ac8
setup.c 25.2 KB