[PATCH][trivial] change rmqueue_bulk argument 'count' to be int

From: Jesper Juhl
Date: Tue Dec 21 2004 - 17:26:54 EST



Hi,

Here's a trivial little patch (hopefully without trivial mistakes) to fix
the function definition for rmqueue_bulk to only accept values it can
actually handle.

Let me explain (and please do let me know if I'm mistaken :) ,
in mm/page_alloc.c the function rmqueue_bulk() is defined to take a
unsigned long as its third argument (count). This argument is then used in
a for loop and being compared to a signed int - /if/ someone was to ever
pass in a value larger than what a signed int can hold we'll have an
infinite loop on our hands.
This does not currently happen since the only caller of rmqueue_bulk is
passing in the 'batch' member of 'struct per_cpu_pages' which is an int.
But, should someone in the future make a change that causes the function
to be called with a >int value we'll have a nice little infinite loop to
debug at runtime, so why not let the compiler help us ensure such a
mistake will be found at compile time?
If the function can only deal with being passed values up to the maximum
of a signed int, then it seems wrong to allow it to be passed something
else. If however situations could arise where it would be desired to pass
the function something larger than int, then it should stay unsigned long,
but then the counter variable 'i' used in the for loop should be changed
to unsigned long instead - I don't know the code well enough to be able to
judge if that's what should happen instead (but since it currently gets
passed only int's that seemed like the proper type to normalize to -
ohh and it'll also get rid of a signed vs unsigned comparison warning
when building with -W, but that's just a tiny added bonus :).

note. I've only compile tested this patch atm.

Signed-off-by: Jesper Juhl <juhl-lkml@xxxxxx>

diff -up linux-2.6.10-rc3-bk13-orig/mm/page_alloc.c linux-2.6.10-rc3-bk13/mm/page_alloc.c
--- linux-2.6.10-rc3-bk13-orig/mm/page_alloc.c 2004-12-06 22:24:56.000000000 +0100
+++ linux-2.6.10-rc3-bk13/mm/page_alloc.c 2004-12-21 23:11:51.000000000 +0100
@@ -396,7 +396,7 @@ static struct page *__rmqueue(struct zon
* Returns the number of new pages which were placed at *list.
*/
static int rmqueue_bulk(struct zone *zone, unsigned int order,
- unsigned long count, struct list_head *list)
+ int count, struct list_head *list)
{
unsigned long flags;
int i;



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