Re: checkpatch.pl and statics

[Benny Halevy <bhalevy@panasas.com>]

On Mar. 16, 2008, 16:13 +0200, Bernd Petrovitsch <bernd@firmix.at> wrote:
> On Son, 2008-03-16 at 15:34 +0200, Benny Halevy wrote:
>> On Mar. 13, 2008, 17:43 +0200, Bernd Petrovitsch <bernd@firmix.at> wrote:
>>> On Don, 2008-03-13 at 16:09 +0100, Andreas Westin XX wrote:
>>> [....]
>>>> I ran checkpatch.pl on a piece of code I wrote and besides all the other
>>>> warnings/errors it complained about a static pointer being initialised
>>>> to NULL/0. I fixed it but I'm curious as to why this is not permitted ?
>>> Because "uninitialized" data is automatically initialized wit 0. An
>>> explicit initialization with 0/NULL wastes space in the kernel image.
>> gcc (at least version >= 4.1.2) seems to smarter than that. It
> 
> That's good news (and new to me too).
> 
>> doesn't seem to put data initialized to zero in the initialized data
>> segment but rather adds it to the uninitialized data. That said,
>> initializing statically allocated data to zero is superfluous in C
>> and should be avoided for style/elegance reasons as well.
> 
> Well, one can discuss endlessly about style and elegance ....

Heh, that's what checkpatch is all about, isn't it? :)
Real errors and warnings should be caught and reported by the compiler...

Benny

> 
> 	Bernd