[PATCH] CodingStyle: memory allocation

This patch adds a new chapter on memory allocation to
Documentation/CodingStyle.

Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This commit is contained in:
Pekka J Enberg 2005-09-16 19:28:11 -07:00 committed by Linus Torvalds
parent f647e08a55
commit af4e5a218e
1 changed files with 20 additions and 1 deletions

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@ -410,7 +410,26 @@ Kernel messages do not have to be terminated with a period.
Printing numbers in parentheses (%d) adds no value and should be avoided.
Chapter 13: References
Chapter 13: Allocating memory
The kernel provides the following general purpose memory allocators:
kmalloc(), kzalloc(), kcalloc(), and vmalloc(). Please refer to the API
documentation for further information about them.
The preferred form for passing a size of a struct is the following:
p = kmalloc(sizeof(*p), ...);
The alternative form where struct name is spelled out hurts readability and
introduces an opportunity for a bug when the pointer variable type is changed
but the corresponding sizeof that is passed to a memory allocator is not.
Casting the return value which is a void pointer is redundant. The conversion
from void pointer to any other pointer type is guaranteed by the C programming
language.
Chapter 14: References
The C Programming Language, Second Edition
by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie.