Object-oriented design patterns in the kernel, part 1

I believe that, unless your class has only plain old data members (the kind you would find in a C struct), doing a bzero of *this has the potential of blowing up. The compiler can add extra hidden members (like the vtable pointer), and you would be overwriting them.

That is, I believe what you are doing is safe only if:

- All the integer and bitfield members (and only them) are in the parent class;
- The parent class is zeroing only itself (that is, it is doing the sizeof(*this) itself, instead of being passed that value by the child class);
- The parent class has no virtual member functions or anything else that could make the compiler add C++ magic to it.

That said, I am no language lawyer, and would not be surprised if several clauses scattered all over the standard combine to say that even then you are still doing something undefined.

Why not move all these variables into a plain C-style struct, add it to your object as a member, and zero it on the constructor? That way sounds much safer to me, and I doubt the C++ standard would break it (since breaking it would break compatibility with C).