[U-Boot] New discussion proposal for u-boot summit: "switch malloc to succeed or die model, as glib does"

[Detlev Zundel <dzu@denx.de>]

Hi Hans,

> Sorry for the poor timing in bringing this up, but this just
> came up when discussing the review of some sunxi patches.
>
> Ian asked me to add error handling for mmc_create failing,
> which, if used properly, only ever fails if calloc fails.
>
> This made me thinking that we should switch u-boot to the
> glib memory alloc failure handling model, which is put a
> die() / abort() inside the low level malloc routines when
> they fail.
>
> The reasoning is that if malloc fails, you're typically looking
> at a fatal error anyways, and this will allow removing error
> handling from a lot of higher level users, reducing code, and
> removing a lot of code paths which are in essence unused and
> as such also very much untested.
>
> I guess there may be some special cases where we don't want
> the malloc_or_die behavior I'm advocating for, for those
> we could introduce a malloc_unchecked function.
>
> Detlev any chance you could squeeze this into the schedule
> somewhere?

I'll note it for the list of things to discuss in the discussion round
in the evening.

Cheers
  Detlev
  
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