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net: devlink: Replace zero-length array with flexible-array member

PATCH New Gustavo A. R. Silva 1 participant 1 message Feb 12, 2020

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PATCH 1/1 net: devlink: 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.

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")

---
 net/core/devlink.c | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
net/core/devlink.c +1 -1
index 549ee56b7a21..a8c1f46319da 100644
@@ -4232,7 +4232,7 @@ struct devlink_fmsg_item {
 	int attrtype;
 	u8 nla_type;
 	u16 len;
-	int value[0];
+	int value[];
 };
 
 struct devlink_fmsg {
Signature · 1 line
2.25.0