2017-05-17 17:34 GMT+02:00 William Roberts <bill.c.roberts@xxxxxxxxx>: >>>>> Is there a particular reason to not just return policybrief_len here as >>>>> well, for consistency in the interface? How do you intend to use this >>>>> value in the caller? >>>> >>>> As called in the other patch to expose policy brief via selinuxfs >>>> (sel_read_policybrief), the intent is to provide the caller with the >>>> length of the string returned. >>>> Or should I set *len to policy brief_len here, and just make the >>>> caller aware that the returned length is in fact the length of the >>>> buffer (i.e. including terminating NUL byte)? >>> >>> What is the caller supposed to do with length? This interface seemed kind of >>> odd. If it's guaranteed NUL byte terminated, do they even need length? >> >> The length is useful as an input parameter in case the caller provides >> its own buffer (instead of letting the function allocate one), and as > > This is what I don't get, why doesn't the function just always allocate? For performance reasons mainly. The caller would have a statically allocated buffer, reused every time it needs to get the policy brief info.
