RE: [PATCH] staging: rtl8723bs: hal: Fix memcpy calls

From: David Laight
Date: Tue Oct 01 2019 - 12:01:36 EST


From: Denis Efremov
> Sent: 01 October 2019 16:13
...
> Just found an official documentation to this issue:
> https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.9/porting_to.html
> "Null pointer checks may be optimized away more aggressively
> ...
> The pointers passed to memmove (and similar functions in <string.h>) must be non-null
> even when nbytes==0, so GCC can use that information to remove the check after the
> memmove call. Calling copy(p, NULL, 0) can therefore deference a null pointer and crash."

Right, so just don't code a NULL pointer test after a memcpy() call.
There is no need to avoid the call itself.

> But again, I would say that the bug in this code is because the if condition was copy-pasted
> and it should be inverted.

Oh, the code is question is just stupidly bad.
It seemed to do:
if (a)
x;
else if (!a)
y;
else
error ("all borked")

If the whole driver is written like that it needs fixing before anyone takes a serious look at it.

David

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