Hi Andy,

I've noticed that checkpatch.pl is getting slower and slower when run on
a whole file, but yesterday I realized that it now is pretty much
unusable:

$ time ./scripts/checkpatch.pl --file drivers/staging/uc2322/aten2011.c

<snip>
total: 168 errors, 126 warnings, 3939 lines checked

drivers/staging/uc2322/aten2011.c has style problems, please review.  If any of these errors
are false positives report them to the maintainer, see
CHECKPATCH in MAINTAINERS.

real	8m7.924s
user	8m7.058s
sys	0m0.116s


I've applied about 10 cleanup patches to this file now, which caused it
to suddenly drop back down to a reasonable time (now around 5 seconds)
to run the script, but I can't seem to figure out what I did to make it
better (bisecting gave inconsistant results).

As the tool is something I point companies at all the time to give them
hints on what is needed to clean up their code, and is what I use daily
when cleaning up drivers/staging/ code, is there any way this can be
fixed?

I've attached the aten2011.c file below that takes so long, so that you
can try this out yourself.  If you want the "faster" version of the
file, look in the next -next release, or I can send it to you as well.

thanks,

greg k-h