Revision 3dbae15538972c9e1578cb216964c2840361a538 authored by Gustavo A. R. Silva on 15 February 2020, 01:03:12 UTC, committed by Dmitry Torokhov on 15 February 2020, 01:19:22 UTC
The current codebase makes use of the zero-length array language
extension to the C90 standard, but the preferred mechanism to declare
variable-length types such as these ones is a flexible array member[1][2],
introduced in C99:

struct foo {
        int stuff;
        struct boo array[];
};

By making use of the mechanism above, we will get a compiler warning
in case the flexible array does not occur last in the structure, which
will help us prevent some kind of undefined behavior bugs from being
inadvertently introduced[3] to the codebase from now on.

Also, notice that, dynamic memory allocations won't be affected by
this change:

"Flexible array members have incomplete type, and so the sizeof operator
may not be applied. As a quirk of the original implementation of
zero-length arrays, sizeof evaluates to zero."[1]

This issue was found with the help of Coccinelle.

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Zero-Length.html
[2] https://github.com/KSPP/linux/issues/21
[3] commit 76497732932f ("cxgb3/l2t: Fix undefined behaviour")

Signed-off-by: Gustavo A. R. Silva <gustavo@embeddedor.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200214172132.GA28389@embeddedor
Signed-off-by: Dmitry Torokhov <dmitry.torokhov@gmail.com>
1 parent 94bef5d
Raw File
.get_maintainer.ignore
Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Marc Gonzalez <marc.w.gonzalez@free.fr>
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