Re: [PATCH 4/5 v2] x86 boot: show pfn addresses in hex not decimal in some kernel info printks

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, 25 Jun 2008, Johannes Berg wrote:
> 
> In networking, we've gone through various incarnations of print_mac()
> which is similar to the sym() macro Paul proposed, and it turned out to
> be undesirable because of the way it interacts with static inlines that
> only optionally contain code at all, the print_mac() function call is
> still emitted by the compiler. People experimented with marking it
> __pure but that had other problems.

You don't even have to go that esoteric.

Just printing things like "sector_t" or "u64" is painful, because the 
exact type depends on config options and/or architecture.

> It would be nice to be able to say
> 
> u8 *eaddr;
> 
> printk(... %M ..., eaddr);

For special things, I do think we should extend the format more, and 
forget about single-character names. It would be lovely to do them as
%[mac], %[u64], %[symbol] or similar. Because once you don't rely on gcc 
checking the string, you can do it.

The problem is that right now we absolutely _do_ rely on gcc checking the 
string, and as such we're forced to use standard patterns, and standard 
patterns _only_. And that means that %M isn't an option, but also that if 
we want symbolic names we'd have to use %p, and not some extension.

But once you drop the 'standard patterns' requirement, I do think you 
should drop it _entirely_, and not just extend it with some pissant 
single-character unreadable mess.

				Linus