Miguel Ojeda authored Jan 19, 2019 and Enrico Scholz committed Sep 11, 2019

commit a6e60d84 upstream.

The upcoming GCC 9 release extends the -Wmissing-attributes warnings
(enabled by -Wall) to C and aliases: it warns when particular function
attributes are missing in the aliases but not in their target.

In particular, it triggers for all the init/cleanup_module
aliases in the kernel (defined by the module_init/exit macros),
ending up being very noisy.

These aliases point to the __init/__exit functions of a module,
which are defined as __cold (among other attributes). However,
the aliases themselves do not have the __cold attribute.

Since the compiler behaves differently when compiling a __cold
function as well as when compiling paths leading to calls
to __cold functions, the warning is trying to point out
the possibly-forgotten attribute in the alias.

In order to keep the warning enabled, we decided to silence
this case. Ideally, we would mark the aliases directly
as __init/__exit. However, there are currently around 132 modules
in the kernel which are missing __init/__exit in their init/cleanup
functions (either because they are missing, or for other reasons,
e.g. the functions being called from somewhere else); and
a section mismatch is a hard error.

A conservative alternative was to mark the aliases as __cold only.
However, since we would like to eventually enforce __init/__exit
to be always marked,  we chose to use the new __copy function
attribute (introduced by GCC 9 as well to deal with this).
With it, we copy the attributes used by the target functions
into the aliases. This way, functions that were not marked
as __init/__exit won't have their aliases marked either,
and therefore there won't be a section mismatch.

Note that the warning would go away marking either the extern
declaration, the definition, or both. However, we only mark
the definition of the alias, since we do not want callers
(which only see the declaration) to be compiled as if the function
was __cold (and therefore the paths leading to those calls
would be assumed to be unlikely).

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190123173707.GA16603@gmail.com/
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190206175627.GA20399@gmail.com/


Suggested-by: Martin Sebor <msebor@gcc.gnu.org>
Acked-by: Jessica Yu <jeyu@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Miguel Ojeda <miguel.ojeda.sandonis@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Stefan Agner <stefan@agner.ch>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>