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Cleanup: Replace oldstyle struct hack with C99 flexible array members

Description

Cleanup: Replace oldstyle struct hack with C99 flexible array members

The Linux 5.16.14 kernel's coccicheck caught this. The semantic
patch that caught it was:

./scripts/coccinelle/misc/flexible_array.cocci

However, unlike the cases where the GNU zero length array extension had
been used, coccicheck would not suggest patches for the older style
single member arrays. That was good because blindly changing them would
break size calculations in most cases.

Therefore, this required care to make sure that we did not break size
calculations. In the case of indirect_split_t, we use
offsetof(indirect_split_t, is_child[is->is_children]) to calculate
size. This might be subtly wrong according to an old mailing list
thread:

https://inbox.sourceware.org/gcc-prs/20021226123454.27019.qmail@sources.redhat.com/T/

That is because the C99 specification should consider the flexible array
members to start at the end of a structure, but compilers prefer to put
padding at the end. A suggestion was made to allow compilers to allocate
padding after the VLA like compilers already did:

http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/WG14/www/docs/n983.htm

However, upon thinking about it, whether or not we allocate end of
structure padding does not matter, so using offsetof() to calculate the
size of the structure is fine, so long as we do not mix it with sizeof()
on structures with no array members.

In the case that we mix them and padding causes offsetof(struct_t,
vla_member[0]) to differ from sizeof(struct_t), we would be doing unsafe
operations if we underallocate via offsetof() and then overcopy via
sizeof().

Reviewed-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Signed-off-by: Richard Yao <richard.yao@alumni.stonybrook.edu>
Closes #14372

Details

Provenance
Richard Yao <richard.yao@alumni.stonybrook.edu>Authored on Jan 10 2023, 8:44 PM
Tony Hutter <hutter2@llnl.gov>Committed on Sep 20 2023, 5:10 PM
Parents
rGae0d644269ad: Linux 6.5 compat: META (#15265)
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Event Timeline

Tony Hutter <hutter2@llnl.gov> committed rGa93c30a2f247: Cleanup: Replace oldstyle struct hack with C99 flexible array members (authored by Richard Yao <richard.yao@alumni.stonybrook.edu>).Sep 20 2023, 5:10 PM