Re: [Intel-wired-lan] [PATCH v4 00/10 iwl-next] idpf: refactor virtchnl messages

[Alan Brady <alan.brady@intel.com>]

On 2/6/2024 10:57 AM, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> On Mon,  5 Feb 2024 19:37:54 -0800 Alan Brady wrote:
>> The motivation for this series has two primary goals. We want to enable
>> support of multiple simultaneous messages and make the channel more
>> robust. The way it works right now, the driver can only send and receive
>> a single message at a time and if something goes really wrong, it can
>> lead to data corruption and strange bugs.
> 
> Coccinelle points out some potential places to use min()
> 
> testing/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/idpf/idpf_virtchnl.c:1956:17-18: WARNING opportunity for min()
> testing/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/idpf/idpf_virtchnl.c:1271:17-18: WARNING opportunity for min()
> testing/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/idpf/idpf_virtchnl.c:1319:17-18: WARNING opportunity for min()
> testing/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/idpf/idpf_virtchnl.c:2640:17-18: WARNING opportunity for min()
> testing/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/idpf/idpf_virtchnl.c:1295:17-18: WARNING opportunity for min()
> testing/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/idpf/idpf_virtchnl.c:2157:17-18: WARNING opportunity for min()
> testing/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/idpf/idpf_virtchnl.c:3582:17-18: WARNING opportunity for min()

We did run coccinelle check and see the min suggestions. It's triggering 
on these statements I added:

return reply_sz < 0 ? reply_sz : 0;

A min here would change it to:

return min(reply_sz, 0);

I didn't really like that because it's misleading as though we're 
returning the size of the reply and might accidentally encourage someone 
to change it to a max. Here reply_sz will be negative if an error was 
returned from message sending. But this function we only want to return 
0 or negative. By being explicit in what we want to do, it seems clearer 
to me what the intention is but I could be wrong.

We can definitely change it however if that's preferred here.