cocci: optimistically use COMPUTE_HEADER_DEPENDENCIES

Improve the incremental rebuilding support of "coccicheck" by
piggy-backing on the computed dependency information of the
corresponding *.o file, rather than rebuilding all <RULE>/<FILE> pairs
if either their corresponding file changes, or if any header changes.

This in effect uses the same method that the "sparse" target was made
to use in c234e8a0ecf (Makefile: make the "sparse" target non-.PHONY,
2021-09-23), except that the dependency on the *.o file isn't a hard
one, we check with $(wildcard) if the *.o file exists, and if so we'll
depend on it.

This means that the common case of:

	make
	make coccicheck

Will benefit from incremental rebuilding, now changing e.g. a header
will only re-run "spatch" on those those *.c files that make use of
it:

By depending on the *.o we piggy-back on
COMPUTE_HEADER_DEPENDENCIES. See c234e8a0ecf (Makefile: make the
"sparse" target non-.PHONY, 2021-09-23) for prior art of doing that
for the *.sp files. E.g.:

    make contrib/coccinelle/free.cocci.patch
    make -W column.h contrib/coccinelle/free.cocci.patch

Will take around 15 seconds for the second command on my 8 core box if
I didn't run "make" beforehand to create the *.o files. But around 2
seconds if I did and we have those "*.o" files.

Notes about the approach of piggy-backing on *.o for dependencies:

 * It *is* a trade-off since we'll pay the extra cost of running the C
   compiler, but we're probably doing that anyway. The compiler is much
   faster than "spatch", so even though we need to re-compile the *.o to
   create the dependency info for the *.c for "spatch" it's
   faster (especially if using "ccache").

 * There *are* use-cases where some would like to have *.o files
   around, but to have the "make coccicheck" ignore them. See:
   https://lore.kernel.org/git/20220826104312.GJ1735@szeder.dev/

   For those users a:

	make
	make coccicheck SPATCH_USE_O_DEPENDENCIES=

   Will avoid considering the *.o files.

 * If that *.o file doesn't exist we'll depend on an intermediate file
   of ours which in turn depends on $(FOUND_H_SOURCES).

   This covers both an initial build, or where "coccicheck" is run
   without running "all" beforehand, and because we run "coccicheck"
   on e.g. files in compat/* that we don't know how to build unless
   the requisite flag was provided to the Makefile.

   Most of the runtime of "incremental" runs is now spent on various
   compat/* files, i.e. we conditionally add files to COMPAT_OBJS, and
   therefore conflate whether we *can* compile an object and generate
   dependency information for it with whether we'd like to link it
   into our binary.

   Before this change the distinction didn't matter, but now one way
   to make this even faster on incremental builds would be to peel
   those concerns apart so that we can see that e.g. compat/mmap.c
   doesn't depend on column.h.

Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>

1 files changed, 16 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/contrib/coccinelle/README b/contrib/coccinelle/README
index f0e80bd..09ea829 100644
--- a/contrib/coccinelle/README
+++ b/contrib/coccinelle/README
@@ -41,3 +41,19 @@ There are two types of semantic patches:
 
    This allows to expose plans of pending large scale refactorings without
    impacting the bad pattern checks.
+
+Git-specific tips & things to know about how we run "spatch":
+
+ * The "make coccicheck" will piggy-back on
+   "COMPUTE_HEADER_DEPENDENCIES". If you've built a given object file
+   the "coccicheck" target will consider its depednency to decide if
+   it needs to re-run on the corresponding source file.
+
+   This means that a "make coccicheck" will re-compile object files
+   before running. This might be unexpected, but speeds up the run in
+   the common case, as e.g. a change to "column.h" won't require all
+   coccinelle rules to be re-run against "grep.c" (or another file
+   that happens not to use "column.h").
+
+   To disable this behavior use the "SPATCH_USE_O_DEPENDENCIES=NoThanks"
+   flag.