On Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 9:59 AM, Ingo Molnar <mi...@kernel.org> wrote: > > So, to continue this side thought about uninitialized_var(), it is dangerous > because the following buggy pattern does not generate a compiler warning: > > long uninitialized_var(error); > > ... > > if (error) > return error; > > > ... and still there are over 290 uses of uninitialized_var() in the kernel - > and > any of them could turn into a silent but real uninitialized variable bugs due > to > subsequent changes.
Right, absolutely agreed on that. A related problem however is blindly initializing variables to NULL to get rid of uninitialized variable warnings, such as struct subsystem_specific *obj = NULL; if (function_argument > 10) goto err; obj = create_obj(); ... err: clean_up(obj->member); I've seen a couple of variations of that problem, so simply outlawing uninitialized_var() will only solve a subset of these issues, and ideally we should also make sure that initializations at declaration time are used properly, and not just to shut up compiler warnings. Arnd