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

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Date:	Fri, 1 Jun 2007 13:59:27 -0700 (PDT)
From:	Christoph Lameter <clameter@....com>
To:	Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@...p.org>
cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
	akpm@...ux-foundation.org
Subject: Re: [RFC 0/4] CONFIG_STABLE to switch off development checks

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?

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