'h' only makes sense for scanf, not printf.
>
> num = va_arg(args, short);
>
> it might be proper to use
>
> num = (short) va_args(args, int);
>
> But I _really_ don't want to just silently drop a documented feature.
>
> Why is it broken on ppc/sparc? I assume it's because they have the wrong
> byte order, but why does this bite only the Linux kernel - it should have
> bitten other things too?
>
The problem is the way stdarg is typically implemented (the va_arg
thing casts something magically to a pointer whose type is taken from
the second argument.) I am 99.9% sure that using a promoted type in
va_arg is incorrect, and that the second form is the correct one.
The error occurs on bigendian machines because you're effectively
doing the moral equivalent of:
foo = *(short *)(&args[n--]);
instead of
foo = (short) *(int *)(&args[n--]);
... which is the same of littleendian boxen but not bigendian.
-hpa
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