Re: [PATCH] xfs: Remove noinline from #define STATIC

[Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>]

On Tue, 2018-11-13 at 16:26 +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 08:23:42PM -0800, Joe Perches wrote:
> > On Tue, 2018-11-13 at 14:09 +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 08:54:10PM -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> > > > On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 12:18:05PM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> > > > > I'm not interested in making code fast if distro support engineers
> > > > > can't debug problems on user systems easily. Optimising for
> > > > > performance over debuggability is a horrible trade off for us to
> > > > > make because it means users and distros end up much more reliant on
> > > > > single points of expertise for debugging problems. And that means
> > > > > the majority of the load of problem triage falls directly on very
> > > > > limited resources - the core XFS development team. A little bit of
> > > > > thought about how to make code easier to triage and debug goes a
> > > > > long, long way....
> > > > 
> > > > So at least in my experience, if the kernels are compiled with
> > > > CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO and/or CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_REDUCED,
> > > > scripts/decode_stracktrace.sh seems to do a very nice job with inlined
> > > 
> > > That doesn't help with kernel profiling and other such things that
> > > are based on callgraphs...
> > 
> > If that's really the case:
> > 
> > I rather suspect the xfs static v STATIC function marking is not
> > particularly curated and the marking is somewhat arbitrary.
> 
> That's a common opinion for an outsider to form when they come
> across something unfamiliar they don't really understand. "I don't
> understand this, so I must rewrite it" is an unfortunate habit that
> programmers have.

Silly.

> > So perhaps given the large number of static, but not STATIC
> > functions, perhaps a sed of s/static/STATIC/ should be done
> > when it's not inline for all xfs functions.
> 
> That's just as bad as removing them all, if not worse. 

Why?

> If you are writing new code or reworking existing code, then we'll
> consider the usage of STATIC/static in the context of that work.
> Otherwise, we leave it alone.

If your statement is as described above, and
the STATIC use to enable call stack tracing i
useful, why shouldn't it be systemic?

> It if ain't broke, don't fix it.

A generically lazy statement.