linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] drivers/video/pmag-ba-fb.c: Improve diagnostics

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Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0709201946130.17093@enigma.security.iitk.ac.in>
Date:	Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:54:31 +0530 (IST)
From:	Satyam Sharma <satyam@...radead.org>
To:	"Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro@...ux-mips.org>
cc:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Antonino Daplas <adaplas@....net>,
	linux-fbdev-devel@...ts.sourceforge.net, linux-mips@...ux-mips.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] drivers/video/pmag-ba-fb.c: Improve diagnostics

On Thu, 20 Sep 2007, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> 
>  Perhaps preinitialising to an error value such as -EINVAL would be of
> more sense.  This way any error paths lacking initialisation are still
> reported as errors, even though the classification might be wrong.

Eeee ... at least I wouldn't prefer that. Why not simply use the
"int x = x;" trick (which is what uninitialized_var() does) -- it shuts
up the warning, and does *nothing* else. The bug will not be hidden, if
there's bad misbehaviour happening due to the bug, it will continue to
happen that way -- thus bringing our attention to it. Pre-initializing
to -EINVAL (or whatever) has the problem that when the bug actually
triggers, something unrelated might happen higher up the callchain, and
we'd be scratching our heads in a "why are we getting a -EINVAL here?"
kind of way ... worse still, we might think that this was _really_ an
EINVAL and go about debugging it ...

Plus, pre-initializing to -EINVAL (or even 0) will waste some bytes in
kernel text size, but no such overhead with uninitialized_var() :-)

Satyam
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