Re: [PATCH 5/8] util/compatfd.c: Replaced a malloc with GLib's variant

[Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>]

On 15/03/2021 07.43, Mahmoud Mandour wrote:
>     If it's unrelated, then maybe better do it in a separate patch.
> 
> 
> I thought so but I didn't know whether it was a so-small change
> that it didn't require its own patch or not. I will amend that.
> 
>     Since this is only a very small allocation, I think it would be better to
>     use g_malloc() here and then simply remove the "if (info == NULL) ..." part.
> 
> 
> I was thinking of always maintaining the semantics of the existing
> code and since g_malloc() does not behave like malloc() on
> error, I refrained from using g_malloc() anywhere, but of course
> I'll do it since it's the better thing to do.

Keeping the semantics is normally a good idea, but the common sense in the 
QEMU project is to rather use g_malloc() for small allocations (if 
allocating some few bytes already fails, then the system is pretty much dead 
anyway), and only g_try_malloc() for huge allocations that really might fail 
on a healthy system, too.

We should likely add some text to our coding style document to make this 
more obvious...

> I will split the patches to a two-patch series regarding the
> util/compactfd.c file (one for the style change and one for
> changing the malloc() call into g_malloc()) and send them
> again, is that ok?

Sounds good, thanks!

  Thomas