git-commit-vandalism/contrib/coccinelle/README

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This directory provides examples of Coccinelle (http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/)
semantic patches that might be useful to developers.
There are two types of semantic patches:
* Using the semantic transformation to check for bad patterns in the code;
The target 'make coccicheck' is designed to check for these patterns and
it is expected that any resulting patch indicates a regression.
The patches resulting from 'make coccicheck' are small and infrequent,
so once they are found, they can be sent to the mailing list as per usual.
Example for introducing new patterns:
67947c34ae (convert "hashcmp() != 0" to "!hasheq()", 2018-08-28)
b84c783882 (fsck: s/++i > 1/i++/, 2018-10-24)
Example of fixes using this approach:
248f66ed8e (run-command: use strbuf_addstr() for adding a string to
a strbuf, 2018-03-25)
f919ffebed (Use MOVE_ARRAY, 2018-01-22)
These types of semantic patches are usually part of testing, c.f.
0860a7641b (travis-ci: fail if Coccinelle static analysis found something
to transform, 2018-07-23)
* Using semantic transformations in large scale refactorings throughout
the code base.
When applying the semantic patch into a real patch, sending it to the
mailing list in the usual way, such a patch would be expected to have a
lot of textual and semantic conflicts as such large scale refactorings
change function signatures that are used widely in the code base.
A textual conflict would arise if surrounding code near any call of such
function changes. A semantic conflict arises when other patch series in
flight introduce calls to such functions.
So to aid these large scale refactorings, semantic patches can be used.
However we do not want to store them in the same place as the checks for
bad patterns, as then automated builds would fail.
That is why semantic patches 'contrib/coccinelle/*.pending.cocci'
are ignored for checks, and can be applied using 'make coccicheck-pending'.
This allows to expose plans of pending large scale refactorings without
impacting the bad pattern checks.
cocci: optimistically use COMPUTE_HEADER_DEPENDENCIES Improve the incremental rebuilding support of "coccicheck" by piggy-backing on the computed dependency information of the corresponding *.o file, rather than rebuilding all <RULE>/<FILE> pairs if either their corresponding file changes, or if any header changes. This in effect uses the same method that the "sparse" target was made to use in c234e8a0ecf (Makefile: make the "sparse" target non-.PHONY, 2021-09-23), except that the dependency on the *.o file isn't a hard one, we check with $(wildcard) if the *.o file exists, and if so we'll depend on it. This means that the common case of: make make coccicheck Will benefit from incremental rebuilding, now changing e.g. a header will only re-run "spatch" on those those *.c files that make use of it: By depending on the *.o we piggy-back on COMPUTE_HEADER_DEPENDENCIES. See c234e8a0ecf (Makefile: make the "sparse" target non-.PHONY, 2021-09-23) for prior art of doing that for the *.sp files. E.g.: make contrib/coccinelle/free.cocci.patch make -W column.h contrib/coccinelle/free.cocci.patch Will take around 15 seconds for the second command on my 8 core box if I didn't run "make" beforehand to create the *.o files. But around 2 seconds if I did and we have those "*.o" files. Notes about the approach of piggy-backing on *.o for dependencies: * It *is* a trade-off since we'll pay the extra cost of running the C compiler, but we're probably doing that anyway. The compiler is much faster than "spatch", so even though we need to re-compile the *.o to create the dependency info for the *.c for "spatch" it's faster (especially if using "ccache"). * There *are* use-cases where some would like to have *.o files around, but to have the "make coccicheck" ignore them. See: https://lore.kernel.org/git/20220826104312.GJ1735@szeder.dev/ For those users a: make make coccicheck SPATCH_USE_O_DEPENDENCIES= Will avoid considering the *.o files. * If that *.o file doesn't exist we'll depend on an intermediate file of ours which in turn depends on $(FOUND_H_SOURCES). This covers both an initial build, or where "coccicheck" is run without running "all" beforehand, and because we run "coccicheck" on e.g. files in compat/* that we don't know how to build unless the requisite flag was provided to the Makefile. Most of the runtime of "incremental" runs is now spent on various compat/* files, i.e. we conditionally add files to COMPAT_OBJS, and therefore conflate whether we *can* compile an object and generate dependency information for it with whether we'd like to link it into our binary. Before this change the distinction didn't matter, but now one way to make this even faster on incremental builds would be to peel those concerns apart so that we can see that e.g. compat/mmap.c doesn't depend on column.h. Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
2022-11-01 23:35:51 +01:00
Git-specific tips & things to know about how we run "spatch":
* The "make coccicheck" will piggy-back on
"COMPUTE_HEADER_DEPENDENCIES". If you've built a given object file
the "coccicheck" target will consider its depednency to decide if
it needs to re-run on the corresponding source file.
This means that a "make coccicheck" will re-compile object files
before running. This might be unexpected, but speeds up the run in
the common case, as e.g. a change to "column.h" won't require all
coccinelle rules to be re-run against "grep.c" (or another file
that happens not to use "column.h").
To disable this behavior use the "SPATCH_USE_O_DEPENDENCIES=NoThanks"
flag.
cocci: run against a generated ALL.cocci The preceding commits to make the "coccicheck" target incremental made it slower in some cases. As an optimization let's not have the many=many mapping of <*.cocci>=<*.[ch]>, but instead concat the <*.cocci> into an ALL.cocci, and then run one-to-many ALL.cocci=<*.[ch]>. A "make coccicheck" is now around 2x as fast as it was on "master", and around 1.5x as fast as the preceding change to make the run incremental: $ git hyperfine -L rev origin/master,HEAD~,HEAD -p 'make clean' 'make coccicheck SPATCH=spatch COCCI_SOURCES="$(echo $(ls o*.c builtin/h*.c))"' -r 3 Benchmark 1: make coccicheck SPATCH=spatch COCCI_SOURCES="$(echo $(ls o*.c builtin/h*.c))"' in 'origin/master Time (mean ± σ): 4.258 s ± 0.015 s [User: 27.432 s, System: 1.532 s] Range (min … max): 4.241 s … 4.268 s 3 runs Benchmark 2: make coccicheck SPATCH=spatch COCCI_SOURCES="$(echo $(ls o*.c builtin/h*.c))"' in 'HEAD~ Time (mean ± σ): 5.365 s ± 0.079 s [User: 36.899 s, System: 1.810 s] Range (min … max): 5.281 s … 5.436 s 3 runs Benchmark 3: make coccicheck SPATCH=spatch COCCI_SOURCES="$(echo $(ls o*.c builtin/h*.c))"' in 'HEAD Time (mean ± σ): 2.725 s ± 0.063 s [User: 14.796 s, System: 0.233 s] Range (min … max): 2.667 s … 2.792 s 3 runs Summary 'make coccicheck SPATCH=spatch COCCI_SOURCES="$(echo $(ls o*.c builtin/h*.c))"' in 'HEAD' ran 1.56 ± 0.04 times faster than 'make coccicheck SPATCH=spatch COCCI_SOURCES="$(echo $(ls o*.c builtin/h*.c))"' in 'origin/master' 1.97 ± 0.05 times faster than 'make coccicheck SPATCH=spatch COCCI_SOURCES="$(echo $(ls o*.c builtin/h*.c))"' in 'HEAD~' This can be turned off with SPATCH_CONCAT_COCCI, but as the beneficiaries of "SPATCH_CONCAT_COCCI=" would mainly be those developing the *.cocci rules themselves, let's leave this optimization on by default. For more information see my "Optimizing *.cocci rules by concat'ing them" (<220901.8635dbjfko.gmgdl@evledraar.gmail.com>) on the cocci@inria.fr mailing list. This potentially changes the results of our *.cocci rules, but as noted in that discussion it should be safe for our use. We don't name rules, or if we do their names don't conflict across our *.cocci files. To the extent that we'd have any inter-dependencies between rules this doesn't make that worse, as we'd have them now if we ran "make coccicheck", applied the results, and would then have (due to hypothetical interdependencies) suggested changes on the subsequent "make coccicheck". Our "coccicheck-test" target makes use of the ALL.cocci when running tests, e.g. when testing unused.{c,out} we test it against ALL.cocci, not unused.cocci. We thus assert (to the extent that we have test coverage) that this concatenation doesn't change the expected results of running these rules. Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
2022-11-01 23:35:54 +01:00
* To speed up our rules the "make coccicheck" target will by default
concatenate all of the *.cocci files here into an "ALL.cocci", and
apply it to each source file.
This makes the run faster, as we don't need to run each rule
against each source file. See the Makefile for further discussion,
this behavior can be disabled with "SPATCH_CONCAT_COCCI=".
But since they're concatenated any <id> in the <rulname> (e.g. "@
my_name", v.s. anonymous "@@") needs to be unique across all our
*.cocci files. You should only need to name rules if other rules
depend on them (currently only one rule is named).
spatchcache: add a ccache-alike for "spatch" Add a rather trivial "spatchcache", with this running e.g.: make cocciclean make contrib/coccinelle/free.cocci.patch \ SPATCH=contrib/coccicheck/spatchcache \ SPATCH_FLAGS=--very-quiet Is cut down from ~20s to ~5s on my system. Much of that is either fixable shell overhead, or the around 40 files we "CANTCACHE" (see the implementation). This uses "redis" as a cache by default, but it's configurable. See the embedded documentation. This is *not* like ccache in that we won't cache failed spatch invocations, or those where spatch suggests changes for us. Those cases are so rare that I didn't think it was worth the bother, by far the most common case is that it has no suggested changes. We'll also refuse to cache any "spatch" invocation that has output on stderr, which means that "--very-quiet" must be added to "SPATCH_FLAGS". Because we narrow the cache to that we don't need to save away stdout, stderr & the exit code. We simply cache the cases where we had no suggested changes. Another benchmark is to compare this with the previous SPATCH_BATCH_SIZE=N, as noted in [1]. Before this (on my 8 core system) running: make clean; time make contrib/coccinelle/array.cocci.patch SPATCH_BATCH_SIZE=0 Would take 33s, but with the preceding changes running without this "spatchcache" is slightly slower, or around 35s: make clean; time make contrib/coccinelle/array.cocci.patch Now doing the same with SPATCH=contrib/coccinelle/spatchcache will take around 6s, but we'll need to compile the *.o files first to take full advantage of it (which can be fast with "ccache"): make clean; make; time make contrib/coccinelle/array.cocci.patch SPATCH=contrib/coccinelle/spatchcache 1. https://lore.kernel.org/git/YwdRqP1CyUAzCEn2@coredump.intra.peff.net/ Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
2022-11-01 23:35:55 +01:00
* To speed up incremental runs even more use the "spatchcache" tool
in this directory as your "SPATCH". It aimns to be a "ccache" for
coccinelle, and piggy-backs on "COMPUTE_HEADER_DEPENDENCIES".
It caches in Redis by default, see it source for a how-to.
In one setup with a primed cache "make coccicheck" followed by a
"make clean && make" takes around 10s to run, but 2m30s with the
default of "SPATCH_CONCAT_COCCI=Y".
With "SPATCH_CONCAT_COCCI=" the total runtime is around ~6m, sped
up to ~1m with "spatchcache".
Most of the 10s (or ~1m) being spent on re-running "spatch" on
files we couldn't cache, as we didn't compile them (in contrib/*
and compat/* mostly).
The absolute times will differ for you, but the relative speedup
from caching should be on that order.