While looking for more appropriate place for the BUILD_BUG_ON macros than its ubi_uboot.h current location (see the http://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2010-April/069391.html thread) I realized the following: 1. There is necessity in general purpose utilities like those that Linux defines in its kernel.h 2. Both - u-boot and tools code should be able to benefit from these utilities. Currently, some of these utilities are located in common.h which is not included by the tools. The only common file is the compiler.h which does not seems to be appropriate place for such things. 3. There are many duplications in the code for utilities not defined in the common.h (such as min_t, max_t, abs, …) 4. In the min/max utilities borrowed from Linux for some reason was omitted strict type checking instead of bringing min_t/max_t especially destined for this purpose. My try to use an original Linux min/max ended up by huge number of compilation warnings like: “comparison of distinct pointer types lacks a cast”
I suggest cleaning this up in the following way: 1. Move general purpose utilities from common.h into new genutils.h file which will be shared between u-boot and tools code. It will be included by common.h and by every tool which want to derive this functionality. 2. Remove all redundant local definitions for min_t, max_t, abs, etc… moving them into genutils.h 3. Extend the genutils.h with useful stuff from kernel.h such as PTR_ALIGN, IS_ALIGNED, clamp, clamp_t, clamp_val, typecheck, typecheck_fn, BUILD_BUG_ON, BUILD_BUG_ON_ZERO, ... 4. Revive the strict type checking for the min/max. Replace the min/max with the min_t/max_t usage for the cases where type checking is not appropriate.
Comments?
Thanks, Michael