Optimize the very slow "coccicheck" target to take advantage of
incremental rebuilding, and fix outstanding dependency problems with
the existing rule.
The rule is now faster both on the initial run as we can make better
use of GNU make's parallelism than the old ad-hoc combination of
make's parallelism combined with $(SPATCH_BATCH_SIZE) and/or the
"--jobs" argument to "spatch(1)".
It also makes us *much* faster when incrementally building, it's now
viable to "make coccicheck" as topic branches are merged down.
The rule didn't use FORCE (or its equivalents) before, so a:
make coccicheck
make coccicheck
Would report nothing to do on the second iteration. But all of our
patch output depended on all $(COCCI_SOURCES) files, therefore e.g.:
make -W grep.c coccicheck
Would do a full re-run, i.e. a a change in a single file would force
us to do a full re-run.
The reason for this (not the initial rationale, but my analysis) is:
* Since we create a single "*.cocci.patch+" we don't know where to
pick up where we left off, or how to incrementally merge e.g. a
"grep.c" change with an existing *.cocci.patch.
* We've been carrying forward the dependency on the *.c files since
63f0a758a0 (add coccicheck make target, 2016-09-15) the rule was
initially added as a sort of poor man's dependency discovery.
As we don't include other *.c files depending on other *.c files
has always been broken, as could be trivially demonstrated
e.g. with:
make coccicheck
make -W strbuf.h coccicheck
However, depending on the corresponding *.c files has been doing
something, namely that *if* an API change modified both *.c and *.h
files we'd catch the change to the *.h we care about via the *.c
being changed.
For API changes that happened only via *.h files we'd do the wrong
thing before this change, but e.g. for function additions (not
"static inline" ones) catch the *.h change by proxy.
Now we'll instead:
* Create a <RULE>/<FILE> pair in the .build directory, E.g. for
swap.cocci and grep.c we'll create
.build/contrib/coccinelle/swap.cocci.patch/grep.c.
That file is the diff we'll apply for that <RULE>-<FILE>
combination, if there's no changes to me made (the common case)
it'll be an empty file.
* Our generated *.patch
file (e.g. contrib/coccinelle/swap.cocci.patch) is now a simple "cat
$^" of all of all of the <RULE>/<FILE> files for a given <RULE>.
In the case discussed above of "grep.c" being changed we'll do the
full "cat" every time, so they resulting *.cocci.patch will always
be correct and up-to-date, even if it's "incrementally updated".
See 1cc0425a27 (Makefile: have "make pot" not "reset --hard",
2022-05-26) for another recent rule that used that technique.
As before we'll:
* End up generating a contrib/coccinelle/swap.cocci.patch, if we
"fail" by creating a non-empty patch we'll still exit with a zero
exit code.
Arguably we should move to a more Makefile-native way of doing
this, i.e. fail early, and if we want all of the "failed" changes
we can use "make -k", but as the current
"ci/run-static-analysis.sh" expects us to behave this way let's
keep the existing behavior of exhaustively discovering all cocci
changes, and only failing if spatch itself errors out.
Further implementation details & notes:
* Before this change running "make coccicheck" would by default end
up pegging just one CPU at the very end for a while, usually as
we'd finish whichever *.cocci rule was the most expensive.
This could be mitigated by combining "make -jN" with
SPATCH_BATCH_SIZE, see 960154b9c1 (coccicheck: optionally batch
spatch invocations, 2019-05-06).
There will be cases where getting rid of "SPATCH_BATCH_SIZE" makes
things worse, but a from-scratch "make coccicheck" with the default
of SPATCH_BATCH_SIZE=1 (and tweaking it doesn't make a difference)
is faster (~3m36s v.s. ~3m56s) with this approach, as we can feed
the CPU more work in a less staggered way.
* Getting rid of "SPATCH_BATCH_SIZE" particularly helps in cases
where the default of 1 yields parallelism under "make coccicheck",
but then running e.g.:
make -W contrib/coccinelle/swap.cocci coccicheck
I.e. before that would use only one CPU core, until the user
remembered to adjust "SPATCH_BATCH_SIZE" differently than the
setting that makes sense when doing a non-incremental run of "make
coccicheck".
* Before the "make coccicheck" rule would have to clean
"contrib/coccinelle/*.cocci.patch*", since we'd create "*+" and
"*.log" files there. Now those are created in
.build/contrib/coccinelle/, which is covered by the "cocciclean" rule
already.
Outstanding issues & future work:
* We could get rid of "--all-includes" in favor of manually
specifying a list of includes to give to "spatch(1)".
As noted upthread of [1] a naïve removal of "--all-includes" will
result in broken *.cocci patches, but if we know the exhaustive
list of includes via COMPUTE_HEADER_DEPENDENCIES we don't need to
re-scan for them, we could grab the headers to include from the
.depend.d/<file>.o.d and supply them with the "--include" option to
spatch(1).q
1. https://lore.kernel.org/git/87ft18tcog.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com/
Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason