RE: [PATCH] scsi: aic7xxx: Fix unintended sign extension issue

[David Laight]

From: James Bottomley
> Sent: 25 October 2018 16:33
> 
> On Thu, 2018-10-25 at 16:13 +0100, Colin King wrote:
> > From: Colin Ian King <colin.king@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> >
> > In the expression "ahc_inb(ahc, port+3) << 24", the initial value is
> > a u8, but is promoted to a signed int, then sign-extended to
> > uint64_t.
> 
> Why is this, that's highly non intuitive?  The compiler is supposed to
> promote to the biggest type, which is uint64_t and then do the
> calculation

Do not doubt the wisdom on the ANSI C committee that decided to do
'value preserving' integer promotions instead of the 'sign preserving'
ones of K&R C.

So 'unsigned char' is promoted to 'int' almost everywhere it is used
(unless they are both the same size - which is allowed).
This means that ahc_inb() << 24 is actually undefined (signed integer
overflow can do anything it likes).

By far the best fix is to change the return type of ahc_inb() to
be 'unsigned int'.
On systems without byte sized registers (about everything except x86)
this will almost certainly generate better code.

	David

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