Subject: Re: linux-next: [DOCS] build warning after merge of the tip tree

From: Peter Zijlstra <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:18:56 +0100

On Fri, Jan 23, 2026 at 01:20:54PM +0100, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:

> > I have of course no idea what so ever how any of this works, but it
> > occurs to me that __acquires() and __releases() are not in that same
> > list, what happens to them?
> 
> You mean in functions like those, for instance:
> 
> 	int device_links_read_lock(void) __acquires(&device_links_srcu)
> 	{
> 	        return srcu_read_lock(&device_links_srcu);
> 	}
> 
> 	void device_links_read_unlock(int idx) __releases(&device_links_srcu)
> 	{
> 	        srcu_read_unlock(&device_links_srcu, idx);
> 	}
> 
> Yeah, we need to add something for those as well.

Yes those. They are pre-existing sparse annotations that have been
co-opted and morphed into the clang thread-safety-analysis.

> > Also, there will 'soon' be an equivalent: __cond_releases():
> > 
> >   https://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email-masked]
> 
> The table "function_xforms" is a set of regular expressions to replace 
> macros into something that will be a pure C function declaration.
> It should be able to handle most macros (*).
> 
> Each line in the table has two arguments:
> 
> 	- a regex
> 	- a replace expression
> 
> In this specific case, if we remove __cond_acquires(.*) from the
> function prototype, the remaining function will be a pure C 
> prototype.
> 
> So, I'd say we need to have all 4 macros there:
> 
> 	(KernRe(r"__cond_acquires\s*\([^\)]*\)"), ""),
> 	(KernRe(r"__cond_releases\s*\([^\)]*\)"), ""),
> 	(KernRe(r"__acquires\s*\([^\)]*\)"), ""),
> 	(KernRe(r"__releases\s*\([^\)]*\)"), ""),
> 
> to avoid any warnings related to such annotations.

There's also:

	__must_hold()
	__must_not_hold()
	__must_hold_shared()

	__acquires_shared()
	__cond_acquires_shared()
	__releases_shared()

	__no_context_analysis

On top of that, structure members can be annotated with:

	__guarded_by()
	__pt_guarded_by()

Thanks!