Re: [RFC 0/4] CONFIG_STABLE to switch off development checks

Christoph Lameter
2007-06-01T20:59:38Z

On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:

> > An allocation of zero bytes usually indicates that the code is not dealing
> > with a special case. Later code may operate on the allocated object. I
> > think its clearer and cleaner if code would deal with that special case
> > explicitly. We have seen a series of code pieces that do uncomfortably
> > looking operations on structures with no objects.
> >
>
> I disagree. There are plenty of boundary conditions where 0 is not
> really a special case, and making it a special case just complicates
> things. I think at least some of the patches posted to silence this
> warning have been generally negative for code quality. If we were
> seeing lots of zero-sized allocations then that might indicate something
> is amiss, but it seems to me that there's just a scattered handful.
>
> I agree that it's always a useful debugging aid to make sure that
> allocated regions are not over-run, but 0-sized allocations are not
> special in this regard.

Still insisting on it even after the discovery of the cpuset kmalloc(0) issue?