Skip to content
Commit 7ef88ad5 authored by Rusty Russell's avatar Rusty Russell
Browse files

BUILD_BUG_ON: make it handle more cases



BUILD_BUG_ON used to use the optimizer to do code elimination or fail
at link time; it was changed to first the size of a negative array (a
nicer compile time error), then (in
8c87df45) to a bitfield.

This forced us to change some non-constant cases to MAYBE_BUILD_BUG_ON();
as Jan points out in that commit, it didn't work as intended anyway.

bitfields: needs a literal constant at parse time, and can't be put under
	"if (__builtin_constant_p(x))" for example.
negative array: can handle anything, but if the compiler can't tell it's
	a constant, silently has no effect.
link time: breaks link if the compiler can't determine the value, but the
	linker output is not usually as informative as a compiler error.

If we use the negative-array-size method *and* the link time trick,
we get the ability to use BUILD_BUG_ON() under __builtin_constant_p()
branches, and maximal ability for the compiler to detect errors at
build time.

We also document it thoroughly.

Signed-off-by: default avatarRusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Cc: Jan Beulich <JBeulich@novell.com>
Acked-by: default avatarHollis Blanchard <hollisb@us.ibm.com>
parent 1bae4ce2
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment