Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:38:30 -0600 (CST)
From: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
To: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org>
cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>, Xi Wang <xi.wang@gmail.com>,
        Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@oracle.com>,
        Jesper Juhl <jj@chaosbits.net>, Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>,
        David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Subject: Re: Uninline kcalloc
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On Tue, 14 Feb 2012, Pekka Enberg wrote:

> On Tue, 14 Feb 2012, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> >> Me neither. I don't think Christoph's SAFE_ARRAY_SIZE() suggestion
> >> makes much sense, really. It's more verbose, less obvious API, and
> >> doesn't really deal with the overflow case cleanly.
>
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 11:09 PM, Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> wrote:
> > IMHO Having a function to deal with the overflow of a multiplication and
> > then do an allocation based on the result is a conflation of two different
> > things that need to be separate. kcalloc only exists because there is
> > an ancient user space function that somehow got a second parameter instead
> > of just using the same as malloc().
>
> It's an ancient userspace function that everybody knows how to use.
> There really isn't big enough gains from SAFE_ARRAY_SIZE() to justify
> a new API. And it's not as if the macro is an elegant way to solve the
> problem at hand either.

Ok then keep the calloc style API but at least allow the refactoring with
an additional function. That way one is able to check if there is an
overflow in size calculation and can differentiate that condition from an
out of memory situation due to a large contiguous allocation attempt.

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