From 053c095a82cf773075e83d7233b5cc19a1f73ece Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Johannes Berg Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 22:09:00 +0100 Subject: netlink: make nlmsg_end() and genlmsg_end() void Contrary to common expectations for an "int" return, these functions return only a positive value -- if used correctly they cannot even return 0 because the message header will necessarily be in the skb. This makes the very common pattern of if (genlmsg_end(...) < 0) { ... } be a whole bunch of dead code. Many places also simply do return nlmsg_end(...); and the caller is expected to deal with it. This also commonly (at least for me) causes errors, because it is very common to write if (my_function(...)) /* error condition */ and if my_function() does "return nlmsg_end()" this is of course wrong. Additionally, there's not a single place in the kernel that actually needs the message length returned, and if anyone needs it later then it'll be very easy to just use skb->len there. Remove this, and make the functions void. This removes a bunch of dead code as described above. The patch adds lines because I did - return nlmsg_end(...); + nlmsg_end(...); + return 0; I could have preserved all the function's return values by returning skb->len, but instead I've audited all the places calling the affected functions and found that none cared. A few places actually compared the return value with <= 0 in dump functionality, but that could just be changed to < 0 with no change in behaviour, so I opted for the more efficient version. One instance of the error I've made numerous times now is also present in net/phonet/pn_netlink.c in the route_dumpit() function - it didn't check for <0 or <=0 and thus broke out of the loop every single time. I've preserved this since it will (I think) have caused the messages to userspace to be formatted differently with just a single message for every SKB returned to userspace. It's possible that this isn't needed for the tools that actually use this, but I don't even know what they are so couldn't test that changing this behaviour would be acceptable. Signed-off-by: Johannes Berg Signed-off-by: David S. Miller --- net/ipv4/tcp_metrics.c | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'net/ipv4/tcp_metrics.c') diff --git a/net/ipv4/tcp_metrics.c b/net/ipv4/tcp_metrics.c index ed9c9a91851c..e5f41bd5ec1b 100644 --- a/net/ipv4/tcp_metrics.c +++ b/net/ipv4/tcp_metrics.c @@ -886,7 +886,8 @@ static int tcp_metrics_dump_info(struct sk_buff *skb, if (tcp_metrics_fill_info(skb, tm) < 0) goto nla_put_failure; - return genlmsg_end(skb, hdr); + genlmsg_end(skb, hdr); + return 0; nla_put_failure: genlmsg_cancel(skb, hdr); -- cgit v1.2.3-59-g8ed1b