Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/4] short circuit out of a few places where we would allocate zero bytes

From: "H. Peter Anvin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2005 08:58:51 -0800

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> 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. 
> 

Yeah, although that might break GNU code which uses xmalloc that is 
included (GNU doesn't have xfree.)  The easiest is just to allocate 1 
byte when the user asks for 0.

Anyone knows what GNU xmalloc does?

	-hpa