RE: [PATCH] soc: aspeed: fix a ternary sign expansion bug

David Laight
2021-04-23T10:55:20Z

From: Sergey Organov
> Sent: 23 April 2021 11:46
>
> David Laight <David.Laight@ACULAB.COM> writes:
>
> > From: Dan Carpenter
> >> Sent: 22 April 2021 10:12
> >>
> >> The intent here was to return negative error codes but it actually
> >> returns positive values. The problem is that type promotion with
> >> ternary operations is quite complicated.
> >>
> >> "ret" is an int. "copied" is a u32. And the snoop_file_read() function
> >> returns long. What happens is that "ret" is cast to u32 and becomes
> >> positive then it's cast to long and it's still positive.
> >>
> >> Fix this by removing the ternary so that "ret" is type promoted directly
> >> to long.
> >>
> >> Fixes: 3772e5da4454 ("drivers/misc: Aspeed LPC snoop output using misc chardev")
> >> Signed-off-by: Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@oracle.com>
> >> ---
> >> drivers/soc/aspeed/aspeed-lpc-snoop.c | 4 +++-
> >> 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> >>
> >> diff --git a/drivers/soc/aspeed/aspeed-lpc-snoop.c b/drivers/soc/aspeed/aspeed-lpc-snoop.c
> >> index 210455efb321..eceeaf8dfbeb 100644
> >> --- a/drivers/soc/aspeed/aspeed-lpc-snoop.c
> >> +++ b/drivers/soc/aspeed/aspeed-lpc-snoop.c
> >> @@ -94,8 +94,10 @@ static ssize_t snoop_file_read(struct file *file, char __user *buffer,
> >> return -EINTR;
> >> }
> >> ret = kfifo_to_user(&chan->fifo, buffer, count, &copied);
> >> + if (ret)
> >> + return ret;
> >>
> >> - return ret ? ret : copied;
> >> + return copied;
> >
> > I wonder if changing it to:
> > return ret ? ret + 0L : copied;
> >
> > Might make people think in the future and not convert it back
> > as an 'optimisation'.
>
> It rather made me think: "what the heck is going on here?!"
>
> Shouldn't it better be:
>
> return ret ? ret : (long)copied;
>
> or even:
>
> return ret ?: (long)copied;

Or change the return type to int ?

The problem is that ?: doesn't behave the way most people expect.
The two possible values have to be converted to the same type.

Together with the broken decision of the original ANSI C committee
to change from K&R's 'sign preserving' to 'value preserving'
integer promotions causes grief here and elsewhere.
(Not no mention breaking existing code!)

David

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