Skip to contentSkip to conversation

misc: vexpress: Replace zero-length array with flexible-array member

PATCH In review Gustavo A. R. Silva 2 participants 2 messages Feb 11, 2020 – Feb 20, 2020

Subsystems (2)
lore
Share & tools
lore
#0 lore raw

PATCH 1/1 misc: vexpress: Replace zero-length array with flexible-array member

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 inadvertenly introduced[3] to the codebase from now on.

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")

---
 drivers/misc/vexpress-syscfg.c | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
drivers/misc/vexpress-syscfg.c +1 -1
index a3c6c773d9dc..5eb51f2be8f0 100644
@@ -49,7 +49,7 @@ struct vexpress_syscfg_func {
 	struct vexpress_syscfg *syscfg;
 	struct regmap *regmap;
 	int num_templates;
-	u32 template[0]; /* Keep it last! */
+	u32 template[]; /* Keep it last! */
 };
 
 
Signature · 1 line
2.25.0
#1 lore raw
Quoted 15 lines · Gustavo A. R. Silva

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 inadvertenly introduced[3] to the codebase from now on.

Quoted 6 lines

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")

Applied for v5.7

--
Regards,
Sudeep