On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, Andrew Morton wrote:
> They are different instances which happen to have the same length (zero).
I guess one could use the slab allocators as a type of reservation
ticket generator with zero sized objects. Hmmm.... But is that really a
useful thing to do?
> But the code will incorrectly decide that they are the same instance. It
> might cause refcounting or accounting errors, for example. I don't know - the
> kernel's a big place.
That would have to occur with objects that are repeatedly allocated and
then linked toghether etc. Linking typicallty requires a listhead so its
typically difficult to do zero length objects.
> I agree the risk is low, but if something _does_ blow up, it will do so subtly.
The cases that we have seen so far are due to array allocations of N
elements where N == 0 leads to the creation of a zero sized object.
The objects of the array are not zero sized it is just that zero of
them are allocated.
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