the printk problem

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Saturday 05 July 2008 00:01, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > We also jump through hoops to print things like sector_t and
> > > resource_size_t.  They always need to be cast to `unsiged long long',
> > > which generates additional stack space and text in some setups.
> > 
> > The thing is that GCC checks types.  So it's fine to add "print this
> > pointer specially", but you can't in general add new printf arguments
> > without also hacking GCC.  Unless you use -Wno-format, and require
> > sparse to check special kernel types.
> 
> It would be excellent if gcc had an extension system so that you could
> add new printf control chars and maybe even tell gcc how to check them.
> But of course, if that were to happen, we couldn't use it for 4-5 years.
> 
> What I had initially proposed was to abuse %S, which takes a wchar_t*. 
> gcc accepts `unsigned long *' for %S.
> 
> Then, we put the kernel-specific control char after the S, so we can
> print an inode (rofl) with
> 
> 	struct inode *inode;
> 
> 	printk("here is an inode: %Si\n", (unsigned long *)inode);
> 
> Downsides are:
> 
> - there's a cast, so you could accidentally do
> 
> 	printk("here is an inode: %Si\n", (unsigned long *)dentry);
> 
> - there's a cast, and they're ugly
> 
> - gcc cannot of course check that the arg matches the control string
> 
> Unfortunately (and this seems weird), gcc printf checking will not
> accept a void* for %S: it _has_ to be wchar_t*, and the checker won't
> permit void* substitution for that.

Repeating myself here...
We can add an alternative alias to printk:

 asmlinkage int printk(const char * fmt, ...)
         __attribute__ ((format (printf, 1, 2))) __cold;
+asmlinkage int custom_printk(const char * fmt, ...) __cold asm ("printk");

custom_printk() is actually just printk(), that is,
we won't need additional function, we need to teach
*printk* about MAC addresses, NIPQUADs etc;

and then use printk() if you use only standard %fmt (and have it
checked by gcc), or use custom_printk() if you have non-standard
%fmt in the format string.

The only downside that in second case, you lose gcc checking.
No big deal.
--
vda