Re: kfree(0) - ok?

From: Jan Engelhardt
Date: Wed Aug 15 2007 - 10:07:06 EST



On Aug 15 2007 09:58, Kyle Moffett wrote:
>
> Irrespective of whatever the standard says, EVERY platform and
> compiler anybody makes nowadays has a NULL pointer value with all
> bits clear. Theoretically the standard allows otherwise, but such
> a decision would break so much code. Linux especially, we rely on
> the uninitialized data to have all bits clear and we depend on that
> producing NULL pointers; if a NULL pointer was not bitwise exactly
> 0 then the test "if (some_ptr != NULL)" would fail and we would
> start dereferencing garbage.

But if kmalloc returns NULL on failure, then testing for NULL
(irrespective of being 0 or 0xDEADBEEF) is ok.
What would actually concern me then is what "if (!some_ptr)" would do.
Probably not the right thing.


Jan
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