While we can opt in individual subsystems which add the required
annotations, such subsystems inevitably include headers from other
subsystems which may not yet have the right annotations, which then
result in false positive warnings.
Making compatible by adding annotations across all common headers
currently requires an excessive number of __no_context_analysis
annotations, or carefully analyzing non-trivial cases to add the correct
annotations. While this is desirable long-term, providing an incremental
path causes less churn and headaches for maintainers not yet interested
in dealing with such warnings.
Rather than clutter headers unnecessary and mandate all subsystem
maintainers to keep their headers working with context analysis,
suppress all -Wthread-safety warnings in headers. Explicitly opt in
headers with context-enabled primitives.
With this in place, we can start enabling the analysis on more complex
subsystems in subsequent changes.
Signed-off-by: Marco Elver <elver@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20251219154418.3592607-26-elver@google.com
Context Analysis is a language extension, which enables statically
checking that required contexts are active (or inactive), by acquiring
and releasing user-definable "context locks". An obvious application is
lock-safety checking for the kernel's various synchronization primitives
(each of which represents a "context lock"), and checking that locking
rules are not violated.
Clang originally called the feature "Thread Safety Analysis" [1]. This
was later changed and the feature became more flexible, gaining the
ability to define custom "capabilities". Its foundations can be found in
"Capability Systems" [2], used to specify the permissibility of
operations to depend on some "capability" being held (or not held).
Because the feature is not just able to express "capabilities" related
to synchronization primitives, and "capability" is already overloaded in
the kernel, the naming chosen for the kernel departs from Clang's
"Thread Safety" and "capability" nomenclature; we refer to the feature
as "Context Analysis" to avoid confusion. The internal implementation
still makes references to Clang's terminology in a few places, such as
`-Wthread-safety` being the warning option that also still appears in
diagnostic messages.
[1] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ThreadSafetyAnalysis.html
[2] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/talc/papers/capabilities.pdf
See more details in the kernel-doc documentation added in this and
subsequent changes.
Clang version 22+ is required.
[peterz: disable the thing for __CHECKER__ builds]
Signed-off-by: Marco Elver <elver@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20251219154418.3592607-3-elver@google.com
Marco Elver