Reviewed-by: Ajay Singh <ajay.kat...@microchip.com>
On Thu, 20 Sep 2018 22:39:11 -0700
Nathan Chancellor <natechancel...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2018 at 01:25:32AM -0400, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu
> wrote:
> > On Thu, 20 Sep 2018 14:26:49 -0700, Nathan Chancellor said:
> > > Clang warns that the address of a pointer will always evaluated
> > > as true in a boolean context:
> > >
> > > drivers/staging/wilc1000/linux_wlan.c:267:20: warning: address of
> > > 'vif->ndev->dev' will always evaluate to 'true'
> > > [-Wpointer-bool-conversion]
> > > if (!(&vif->ndev->dev))
> > > ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~^~~
> > > 1 warning generated.
> > >
> > > Since this statement always evaluates to false due to the logical
> > > not, remove it.
> >
> > Often, "just nuke it because it's now dead code" isn't the best
> > answer...
> >
> > At one time, that was likely intended to be checking whether ->dev
> > was a null pointer, to make sure we don't pass request_firmware() a
> > null pointer and oops the kernel, or other things that go
> > pear-shaped....
> >
> > So the question becomes: Is it safe to just remove it, or was it
> > intended to test for something that could legitimately be null if
> > we've hit an error along the way (which means we should fix the
> > condition to be proper and acceptable to both gcc and clang)?
> >
> >
>
> I certainly considered whether or not removing the check versus fixing
> it was the correct answer. Given that this check can be traced back to
> the initial check in of the driver in 2015, I figured it was safe to
> remove it (since a null pointer dereference would most likely have
> been noticed by now).
>
> Most patches addressing this warning just remove the check given that
> it's not actually changing the code, such as commit a7dc662c6a7b
> ("ASoC: codecs: PCM1789: unconditionally flush work"). However, if
> the driver authors and/or maintainers think that this check should be
> something else (maybe checking that the contents of dev is not null
> versus the address, I'm perfectly happy to submit a v2 with this
> change.
>
The 'if' condition was intended to check the validity of net_device
structure, but i think its not required here.
The device pointer used in request_firmware(), was received in
the probe functions and different from the one checked in 'if'
condition.
Thus its safe to remove the 'if (!(&vif->ndev->dev))' condition
block.
Regards,
Ajay
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