Re: [PATCH] soc: aspeed: fix a ternary sign expansion bug

[Dan Carpenter]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 01:45:40PM +0300, Sergey Organov wrote:
> David Laight <David.Laight@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
> > From: Dan Carpenter
> >> Sent: 22 April 2021 10:12
> >> 
> >> The intent here was to return negative error codes but it actually
> >> returns positive values.  The problem is that type promotion with
> >> ternary operations is quite complicated.
> >> 
> >> "ret" is an int.  "copied" is a u32.  And the snoop_file_read() function
> >> returns long.  What happens is that "ret" is cast to u32 and becomes
> >> positive then it's cast to long and it's still positive.
> >> 
> >> Fix this by removing the ternary so that "ret" is type promoted directly
> >> to long.
> >> 
> >> Fixes: 3772e5da4454 ("drivers/misc: Aspeed LPC snoop output using misc chardev")
> >> Signed-off-by: Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@xxxxxxxxxx>
> >> ---
> >>  drivers/soc/aspeed/aspeed-lpc-snoop.c | 4 +++-
> >>  1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> >> 
> >> diff --git a/drivers/soc/aspeed/aspeed-lpc-snoop.c b/drivers/soc/aspeed/aspeed-lpc-snoop.c
> >> index 210455efb321..eceeaf8dfbeb 100644
> >> --- a/drivers/soc/aspeed/aspeed-lpc-snoop.c
> >> +++ b/drivers/soc/aspeed/aspeed-lpc-snoop.c
> >> @@ -94,8 +94,10 @@ static ssize_t snoop_file_read(struct file *file, char __user *buffer,
> >>  			return -EINTR;
> >>  	}
> >>  	ret = kfifo_to_user(&chan->fifo, buffer, count, &copied);
> >> +	if (ret)
> >> +		return ret;
> >> 
> >> -	return ret ? ret : copied;
> >> +	return copied;
> >
> > I wonder if changing it to:
> > 	return ret ? ret + 0L : copied;
> >
> > Might make people think in the future and not convert it back
> > as an 'optimisation'.
> 
> It rather made me think: "what the heck is going on here?!"
> 
> Shouldn't it better be:
> 
>  	return ret ? ret : (long)copied;
> 
> or even:
> 
>         return ret ?: (long)copied;

I work with Greg a lot and his bias against ternaries has rubbed off a
bit.  They're sort of Perl-ish.  And I have nothing against Perl.  It's
a perfectly fine programming language, but when I write Perl I write it
in C.

regards,
dan carpenter