From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2007 13:07:47 +0530 (IST) From: Satyam Sharma Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] type safe allocator In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Miklos Szeredi Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, akpm@linux-foundation.org, torvalds@linux-foundation.org List-ID: Hi Miklos, On Wed, 1 Aug 2007, Miklos Szeredi wrote: > I wonder why we don't have type safe object allocators a-la new() in > C++ or g_new() in glib? > > fooptr = k_new(struct foo, GFP_KERNEL); > > is nicer and more descriptive than > > fooptr = kmalloc(sizeof(*fooptr), GFP_KERNEL); > > and more safe than > > fooptr = kmalloc(sizeof(struct foo), GFP_KERNEL); > > And we have zillions of both variants. > > Note, I'm not advocating mass replacement, but using this in new code, > and gradually converting old ones whenever they need touching anyway. > [...] > > +/** > + * k_new - allocate given type object > + * @type: the type of the object to allocate > + * @flags: the type of memory to allocate. > + */ > +#define k_new(type, flags) ((type *) kmalloc(sizeof(type), flags)) What others already said, plus: kmalloc()'ing sizeof(struct foo) is not always what we want in C either. Several kernel structs have zero-length / variable-length array members and space must be allocated for them only at alloc() time ... would be impossible to make them work with this scheme. Satyam -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org