[dpdk-dev] [PATCH] string: fix potential seg fault on snprintf

[Richardson, Bruce]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Olivier MATZ [mailto:olivier.matz at 6wind.com]
> Sent: Monday, June 30, 2014 12:42 AM
> To: Richardson, Bruce; De Lara Guarch, Pablo; dev at dpdk.org
> Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] [PATCH] string: fix potential seg fault on snprintf
> 
> Hello Bruce,
> 
> On 06/27/2014 06:36 PM, Richardson, Bruce wrote:
> > Famous last words include "that could never happen!" :-)
> > Since this is not a performance critical piece of code, it does not hurt to leave
> the Null-check in, and get the additional safety of checking for invalid inputs.
> 
> The "it does not hurt" should not be an argument to keep a patch.
> If we follow your reasoning, we should also add tests of
> RTE_LOG(..., NULL, ...), rte_eth_dev_*(NULL, ...), ...
> 

Actually, I see no issue with adding tests for all those cases. The only time I would agree with not testing all inputs for validity is in a performance critical code path.

> In this particular case, giving a NULL argument is meaningless because
> the semantic of the function is precisely to write something in the
> buffer. Moreover, as I already said, this function is not called by the
> user directly.
> 
> Regards,
> Olivier