Re: linux-kernel: Unused static inline functions

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

On Thu, 23 Apr 2020, Joe Perches wrote:

> (adding Julia Lawall and Dan Carpenter who may have ideas too)
>
> On Thu, 2020-04-23 at 11:57 -0700, Nick Desaulniers wrote:
> > I've been mulling over teaching a class internally at Google on
> > getting started contributing to the Linux kernel.  I think this idea
> > (removing dead static inline functions) is perfect for having lots of
> > small little tasks that are clear wins.  Do you have any other ideas
> > for work that there's a lot of?  Like lots of small little bite sized
> > tasks?  Maybe more fallthrough conversion? Anything else?
>
> Some generic ideas:
>
> o look for always unused/unreferenced, or always static
>   value function arguments and remove them
>
> o int function returns constrained to 0 or 1 could be
>   converted to bool.
>
> And some logging ideas:
>
> o printk to tracing conversions
>
> o removal of printks used just for function tracing
>   as ftrace works well
>
> o pr_<level> macro conversions to functions to save
>   object space
>
> o singletons for pr_fmt
>
> o default use of #define pr_fmt(fmt) KBUILD_MODNAME ": " fmt
>   and removal of the ~1200 current defines treewide
>
> > Happy to have folks use your script and add your suggested by tag.
>
> Suggested-by doesn't have much value to me,
> especially for scripted stuff.
>
> I'd be happy enough that it gets done eventually.

Perhaps typedefs for structures?  Using standard list operations?  In
staging there are a lot of camel case and variables whose names
incorporate their type.

julia