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Commit fba4168e authored by Gustavo A. R. Silva's avatar Gustavo A. R. Silva Committed by Linus Torvalds
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gcov: gcc_4_7: replace zero-length array with flexible-array member

The current codebase makes use of the zero-length array language extension
to the C90 standard, but the preferred mechanism to declare
variable-length types such as these ones is a flexible array member[1][2],
introduced in C99:

struct foo {
        int stuff;
        struct boo array[];
};

By making use of the mechanism above, we will get a compiler warning in
case the flexible array does not occur last in the structure, which will
help us prevent some kind of undefined behavior bugs from being
inadvertently introduced[3] to the codebase from now on.

Also, notice that, dynamic memory allocations won't be affected by this
change:

"Flexible array members have incomplete type, and so the sizeof operator
may not be applied.  As a quirk of the original implementation of
zero-length arrays, sizeof evaluates to zero."[1]

This issue was found with the help of Coccinelle.

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Zero-Length.html
[2] https://github.com/KSPP/linux/issues/21


[3] commit 76497732 ("cxgb3/l2t: Fix undefined behaviour")

Signed-off-by: default avatarGustavo A. R. Silva <gustavo@embeddedor.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: default avatarPeter Oberparleiter <oberpar@linux.ibm.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200213152241.GA877@embeddedor


Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent 06d4f815
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