RE: [PATCH v3] provide rule for finding refcounters

[Julia Lawall <julia.lawall@lip6.fr>]

On Tue, 29 Aug 2017, Reshetova, Elena wrote:

> Hi, I am very sorry for the delayed reply. Finally unrigging my inbox :(
>
> > A few more small issues:
> >
> > When you deleted the disjunction, you kept the surrounding parentheses.
> > you can drop them (lines 83 and 85).
> >
> > I guess that the "del" regular expression is supposed to be matching
> > delete.  But it also matches delayed, eg
> >
> > net/batman-adv/bridge_loop_avoidance.c:1495:8-27:
> > atomic_dec_and_test variation before object free at line 1507.
>
> Actually the idea is to match them both :) "delete" because it is obvious,
> "delay", exactly because "queue_delayed_work" (in addition to "queue_work") is a common way some
> structure destruction might be scheduled. It might give false positives, since
> the queued work might not be related to freeing the object, but at least
> we don't miss such cases. The issue also that you do want to have "del" pattern
> since I think some functions are of kind xyz_del() also and I want to catch them as well.
> Of course del then might catch some other non-queue related "delay", but I haven't seen that many
> to consider it a problem.
>
> >
> > In the following result, the lines are at least quite far apart.  I don't
> > know if there is some way to consider this to be a false positive:
> >
> > fs/btrfs/disk-io.c:708:14-33: atomic_dec_and_test
> > variation before object free at line 775.
>
> I actually think this is a valid result. Yes, there are a lot of things happening
> in between the dec_and_test and actual free on the buffer, but kernel structures
> can be so complicated that it might legitimately (like in this case) take that long
> for it to cleanup before the real free can be done.

OK, if you are happy with the results of the regexps, I think that the
only remaining improvement was an extra pair of () where there was no
longer a disjuction.  If you want to send it back, then I can ack it.

julia

>
> Best Regards,
> Elena.
>
> >
> > julia
> >
> > On Wed, 16 Aug 2017, Elena Reshetova wrote:
> >
> > > changes in v3:
> > > Removed unnessesary rule 4 conditions pointed by Julia.
> > >
> > > changes in v2:
> > > Following the suggestion from Julia the first rule is split into
> > > 2. The output does not differ that much between these two versions,
> > > but rule became more precise.
> > >
> > > Elena Reshetova (1):
> > >   Coccinelle: add atomic_as_refcounter script
> > >
> > >  scripts/coccinelle/api/atomic_as_refcounter.cocci | 133
> > ++++++++++++++++++++++
> > >  1 file changed, 133 insertions(+)
> > >  create mode 100644 scripts/coccinelle/api/atomic_as_refcounter.cocci
> > >
> > > --
> > > 2.7.4
> > >
> > >
>