Hi Gustavo,
On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 10:49 PM Gustavo A. R. Silva
<gustavo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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
> unadvertenly introduced[3] to the codebase from now on.
>
> All these instances of code were found with the help of the following
> Coccinelle script:
>
> @@
> identifier S, member, array;
> type T1, T2;
> @@
>
> struct S {
> ...
> T1 member;
> T2 array[
> - 0
> ];
> };
I've stumbled across one more in include/uapi/linux/usb/ch9.h:
struct usb_key_descriptor {
__u8 bLength;
__u8 bDescriptorType;
__u8 tTKID[3];
__u8 bReserved;
__u8 bKeyData[0];
} __attribute__((packed));
And it seems people are (ab)using one-sized arrays for flexible arrays, too:
struct usb_string_descriptor {
__u8 bLength;
__u8 bDescriptorType;
__le16 wData[1]; /* UTF-16LE encoded */
} __attribute__ ((packed));
As this is UAPI, we have to be careful for regressions, though.
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds
