minmax: improve macro expansion and type checking

This clarifies the rules for min()/max()/clamp() type checking and makes
them a much more efficient macro expansion.

In particular, we now look at the type and range of the inputs to see
whether they work together, generating a mask of acceptable comparisons,
and then just verifying that the inputs have a shared case:

 - an expression with a signed type can be used for
    (1) signed comparisons
    (2) unsigned comparisons if it is statically known to have a
        non-negative value

 - an expression with an unsigned type can be used for
    (3) unsigned comparison
    (4) signed comparisons if the type is smaller than 'int' and thus
        the C integer promotion rules will make it signed anyway

Here rule (1) and (3) are obvious, and rule (2) is important in order to
allow obvious trivial constants to be used together with unsigned
values.

Rule (4) is not necessarily a good idea, but matches what we used to do,
and we have extant cases of this situation in the kernel.  Notably with
bcachefs having an expression like

	min(bch2_bucket_sectors_dirty(a), ca->mi.bucket_size)

where bch2_bucket_sectors_dirty() returns an 's64', and
'ca->mi.bucket_size' is of type 'u16'.

Technically that bcachefs comparison is clearly sensible on a C type
level, because the 'u16' will go through the normal C integer promotion,
and become 'int', and then we're comparing two signed values and
everything looks sane.

However, it's not entirely clear that a 'min(s64,u16)' operation makes a
lot of conceptual sense, and it's possible that we will remove rule (4).
After all, the _reason_ we have these complicated type checks is exactly
that the C type promotion rules are not very intuitive.

But at least for now the rule is in place for backwards compatibility.

Also note that rule (2) existed before, but is hugely relaxed by this
commit.  It used to be true only for the simplest compile-time
non-negative integer constants.  The new macro model will allow cases
where the compiler can trivially see that an expression is non-negative
even if it isn't necessarily a constant.

For example, the amdgpu driver does

	min_t(size_t, sizeof(fru_info->serial), pia[addr] & 0x3F));

because our old 'min()' macro would see that 'pia[addr] & 0x3F' is of
type 'int' and clearly not a C constant expression, so doing a 'min()'
with a 'size_t' is a signedness violation.

Our new 'min()' macro still sees that 'pia[addr] & 0x3F' is of type
'int', but is smart enough to also see that it is clearly non-negative,
and thus would allow that case without any complaints.

Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@kernel.org>
Cc: David Laight <David.Laight@aculab.com>
Cc: Lorenzo Stoakes <lorenzo.stoakes@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/compiler.h b/include/linux/compiler.h
index 2594553bb30b..2df665fa2964 100644
--- a/include/linux/compiler.h
+++ b/include/linux/compiler.h
@@ -297,6 +297,15 @@ static inline void *offset_to_ptr(const int *off)
 #define is_unsigned_type(type) (!is_signed_type(type))
 
 /*
+ * Useful shorthand for "is this condition known at compile-time?"
+ *
+ * Note that the condition may involve non-constant values,
+ * but the compiler may know enough about the details of the
+ * values to determine that the condition is statically true.
+ */
+#define statically_true(x) (__builtin_constant_p(x) && (x))
+
+/*
  * This is needed in functions which generate the stack canary, see
  * arch/x86/kernel/smpboot.c::start_secondary() for an example.
  */