There is a regular need in the kernel to provide a way to declare
having a dynamically sized set of trailing elements in a structure.
Kernel code should always use “flexible array members”[1] for these
cases. The older style of one-element or zero-length arrays should
no longer be used[2].
This code was transformed with the help of Coccinelle:
(linux-5.19-rc2$ spatch --jobs $(getconf _NPROCESSORS_ONLN) --sp-file script.cocci --include-headers --dir . > output.patch)
@@
identifier S, member, array;
type T1, T2;
@@
struct S {
...
T1 member;
T2 array[
- 0
];
};
-fstrict-flex-arrays=3 is coming and we need to land these changes
to prevent issues like these in the short future:
../fs/minix/dir.c:337:3: warning: 'strcpy' will always overflow; destination buffer has size 0,
but the source string has length 2 (including NUL byte) [-Wfortify-source]
strcpy(de3->name, ".");
^
Since these are all [0] to [] changes, the risk to UAPI is nearly zero. If
this breaks anything, we can use a union with a new member name.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_array_member
[2] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.16/process/deprecated.html#zero-length-and-one-element-arrays
Link: https://github.com/KSPP/linux/issues/78
Build-tested-by: kernel test robot <lkp@intel.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/62b675ec.wKX6AOZ6cbE71vtF%25lkp@intel.com/
Acked-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com> # For ndctl.h
Signed-off-by: Gustavo A. R. Silva <gustavoars@kernel.org>
The current codebase makes use of the zero-length array language
extension to the C90 standard, but the preferred mechanism to declare
variable-length types such as these ones is a flexible array member[1][2],
introduced in C99:
struct foo {
int stuff;
struct boo array[];
};
By making use of the mechanism above, we will get a compiler warning
in case the flexible array does not occur last in the structure, which
will help us prevent some kind of undefined behavior bugs from being
inadvertently introduced[3] to the codebase from now on.
Also, notice that, dynamic memory allocations won't be affected by
this change:
"Flexible array members have incomplete type, and so the sizeof operator
may not be applied. As a quirk of the original implementation of
zero-length arrays, sizeof evaluates to zero."[1]
sizeof(flexible-array-member) triggers a warning because flexible array
members have incomplete type[1]. There are some instances of code in
which the sizeof operator is being incorrectly/erroneously applied to
zero-length arrays and the result is zero. Such instances may be hiding
some bugs. So, this work (flexible-array member conversions) will also
help to get completely rid of those sorts of issues.
This issue was found with the help of Coccinelle.
[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Zero-Length.html
[2] https://github.com/KSPP/linux/issues/21
[3] commit 76497732932f ("cxgb3/l2t: Fix undefined behaviour")
Signed-off-by: Gustavo A. R. Silva <gustavoars@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net>
Acked-by: Yonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20200507185057.GA13981@embeddedor
Gustavo A. R. Silva