Amit Choudhary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > --- Christoph Hellwig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Sun, Jan 07, 2007 at 12:46:50AM -0800, Amit Choudhary wrote:
>> > Well, I am not proposing this as a debugging aid. The idea is about correct >> > programming, >> atleast >> > from my view. Ideally, if you kfree(x), then you should set x to NULL. So, >> > either programmers >> do >> > it themselves or a ready made macro do it for them. >> >> No, you should not. I suspect that's the basic point you're missing. > Any strong reason why not? x has some value that does not make sense and can > create only problems. And as I explained, it can result in longer code too. > So, why keep this value around. Why not re-initialize it to NULL. 1) Because some magic value like 0x23 would be better. 2) Because it hides bugs like double frees or dangeling references while creating a race condition. In the end, you'll get more hard-to-find bugs in exchange for papering over some easy-to-spot bugs. > If x should not be re-initialized to NULL, then by the same logic, we should > not even initialize local variables. And all of us know that local variables > should be initialized. That may hide bugs, too. Therefore this isn't done in the kernel unless you intend to depend on an initial value. -- Ich danke GMX dafür, die Verwendung meiner Adressen mittels per SPF verbreiteten Lügen zu sabotieren. http://david.woodhou.se/why-not-spf.html - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
