Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
gcc-10: disable 'array-bounds' warning for now
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
This is another fine warning, related to the 'zero-length-bounds' one,
but hitting the same historical code in the kernel.

Because C didn't historically support flexible array members, we have
code that instead uses a one-sized array, the same way we have cases of
zero-sized arrays.

The one-sized arrays come from either not wanting to use the gcc
zero-sized array extension, or from a slight convenience-feature, where
particularly for strings, the size of the structure now includes the
allocation for the final NUL character.

So with a "char name[1];" at the end of a structure, you can do things
like

       v = my_malloc(sizeof(struct vendor) + strlen(name));

and avoid the "+1" for the terminator.

Yes, the modern way to do that is with a flexible array, and using
'offsetof()' instead of 'sizeof()', and adding the "+1" by hand.  That
also technically gets the size "more correct" in that it avoids any
alignment (and thus padding) issues, but this is another long-term
cleanup thing that will not happen for 5.7.

So disable the warning for now, even though it's potentially quite
useful.  Having a slew of warnings that then hide more urgent new issues
is not an improvement.

Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
  • Loading branch information
torvalds committed May 9, 2020
1 parent 5c45de2 commit 4472099
Showing 1 changed file with 1 addition and 0 deletions.
1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions Makefile
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -879,6 +879,7 @@ KBUILD_CFLAGS += $(call cc-disable-warning, stringop-truncation)

# We'll want to enable this eventually, but it's not going away for 5.7 at least
KBUILD_CFLAGS += $(call cc-disable-warning, zero-length-bounds)
KBUILD_CFLAGS += $(call cc-disable-warning, array-bounds)

# Enabled with W=2, disabled by default as noisy
KBUILD_CFLAGS += $(call cc-disable-warning, maybe-uninitialized)
Expand Down

0 comments on commit 4472099

Please sign in to comment.