On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 07:02:59AM +0000, Christophe Leroy wrote: > > > Le 26/02/2024 à 20:09, Rick Edgecombe a écrit : > > Future changes will need to add a field to struct vm_unmapped_area_info. > > This would cause trouble for any archs that don't initialize the > > struct. Currently every user sets each field, so if new fields are > > added, the core code parsing the struct will see garbage in the new > > field. > > > > It could be possible to initialize the new field for each arch to 0, but > > instead simply inialize the field with a C99 struct inializing syntax. > > Why doing a full init of the struct when all fields are re-written a few > lines after ?
It's a nice change for robustness and makes future changes easier. It's not actually wasteful since the compiler will throw away all redundant stores. > If I take the exemple of powerpc function slice_find_area_bottomup(): > > struct vm_unmapped_area_info info; > > info.flags = 0; > info.length = len; > info.align_mask = PAGE_MASK & ((1ul << pshift) - 1); > info.align_offset = 0; But one cleanup that is possible from explicitly zero-initializing the whole structure would be dropping all the individual "= 0" assignments. :) -- Kees Cook
