On Thursday, October 14, 2010 04:29:51 Wolfgang Denk wrote:
Reinhard Meyer wrote:
dev = (struct eth_device *)malloc(sizeof *dev);
memset(dev, 0, sizeof(*dev));sprintf (dev->name, "RTL8139#%d", card_number);
Apparently its quite common NOT to check malloc()'s possible NULL return value... At least most NET drivers don't seem to...
Maybe another RFC to avoid duplicating code:
malloc_cleared_panic() to allocate and clear memory for a really required structure and put a proper panic message if that fails. Assuming that continuing u-boot once a driver cannot even be initialized is futile, that would save even more code in each driver.
Don't invent the wheel. If you really want to take that route, then copy existing solutions from other projects. Some of them use xmalloc() for this purpose; see for example BusyBox: http://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/libbb/xfuncs_printf.c lines 44...51
yes, xmalloc/xzalloc/xrealloc are the commonly named funcs. and we'll generally want zalloc too. -mike