From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2005 04:38:10 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/4] short circuit out of a few places where we would allocate zero bytes
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0512272036380.14098@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <43B21312.50603@zytor.com>



On Tue, 27 Dec 2005, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 
> Better yet, either always return NULL or allocate 1 byte in that case, to get
> consistent behaviour.

Yes. However, if you do the "return NULL" case (which is nicest), you'll 
have to wrap "free()" too. There are some libraries where passing "free()" 
a NULL pointer causes a SIGSEGV.

That said, I think that would be preferable to changing the source code to 
unnecessarily avoid zero-sized allocations. Having a "xfree()" to match 
"xmalloc()" makes sense. 

		Linus