KernelTrap: Losing Bugs In Warnings

“Jeff Garzik suggested that more recent versions of GCC have
been getting more and more verbose, ‘the level of warnings in a
kernel build has lately increased to the point where it is hiding
bugs and otherwise making life difficult.’ He started a new
‘gccbug’ branch in which he’s been silencing bogus warning after
verifying that they are indeed bogus, ‘the audit has already
uncovered several minor bugs, lending credence to my theory that
too many warnings hides bugs.’ Daniel Walker pointed to an earlier
posting in which a macro was created to handle false positives. He
summarized concerns raised in the earlier discussion, ‘it’s not
about anyone not reviewing the code properly when the warning is
first silenced. It’s that future changes might create new problems
that are also silenced. I don’t think it’s a huge concern,
especially since there’s was a config option to turn the warning
backs on…'”

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