The thorny case of kmalloc(0) [LWN.net]

The thorny case of kmalloc(0)

Posted Jun 7, 2007 11:59 UTC (Thu) by HenrikH (guest, #31152)
In reply to: The thorny case of kmalloc(0) by evgeny
Parent article: The thorny case of kmalloc(0)

And you are correct, but since there is people who apparantly uses kmalloc (0) I can se no other way to solve this problem. Either we let kmalloc return NULL only on error and not let size=0 be an error or we have to convert all these kmalloc(0) cases which turnoed out be quite a job.

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The thorny case of kmalloc(0)

Posted Jun 8, 2007 0:41 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

The article gives a perfectly good reason why kmalloc(0) is a decent thing to do: when the config has resulted in a struct with 0 members. Much easier just to kmalloc(0) and continue as normal rather than scattering more #ifdefs or macros everywhere.

(there's no need to test for ZERO_SIZE_PTR in this case because the struct has no members so the pointer can not be dereferenced anyway; you'll get a compile-time error instead of an oops)