We can place this in definitions that we expect the compiler to remove by
dead code elimination. If this assertion fails, we get a nice error
message at build time.
The GCC function attribute error("message") was added in version 4.3, so
we define a new macro __linktime_error(message) to expand to this for
GCC-4.3 and later. This will give us an error diagnostic from the
compiler on the line that fails. For other compilers
__linktime_error(message) expands to nothing, and we have to be content
with a link time error, but at least we will still get a build error.
BUILD_BUG() expands to the undefined function __build_bug_failed() and
will fail at link time if the compiler ever emits code for it. On GCC-4.3
and later, attribute((error())) is used so that the failure will be noted
at compile time instead.
Signed-off-by: David Daney <david.daney@cavium.com> Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Cc: DM <dm.n9107@gmail.com> Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org> Acked-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>