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[next] bna: bnad: Replace zero-length array with flexible-array member

Message ID 20200302121051.GA28820@embeddedor
State Accepted
Headers show
Series [next] bna: bnad: Replace zero-length array with flexible-array member | expand

Commit Message

Gustavo A. R. Silva March 2, 2020, 12:10 p.m. 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>
---
 drivers/net/ethernet/brocade/bna/bnad.h | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

Comments

David Miller March 2, 2020, 7:28 p.m. UTC | #1
From: "Gustavo A. R. Silva" <gustavo@embeddedor.com>
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2020 06:10:51 -0600

> 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>

Applied.
diff mbox series

Patch

diff --git a/drivers/net/ethernet/brocade/bna/bnad.h b/drivers/net/ethernet/brocade/bna/bnad.h
index 492a02d54f14..bfa58b40dc3f 100644
--- a/drivers/net/ethernet/brocade/bna/bnad.h
+++ b/drivers/net/ethernet/brocade/bna/bnad.h
@@ -253,7 +253,7 @@  struct bnad_rx_unmap_q {
 	int			alloc_order;
 	u32			map_size;
 	enum bnad_rxbuf_type	type;
-	struct bnad_rx_unmap	unmap[0] ____cacheline_aligned;
+	struct bnad_rx_unmap	unmap[] ____cacheline_aligned;
 };
 
 #define BNAD_PCI_DEV_IS_CAT2(_bnad) \