Currently QEMU has 9 uses of variable length arrays (found using -Wvla): hw/block/dataplane/virtio-blk.c:62:25: warning: variable length array used [-Wvla] unsigned long bitmap[BITS_TO_LONGS(nvqs)]; ^ hw/i386/multiboot.c:364:18: warning: variable length array used [-Wvla] char kcmdline[strlen(kernel_filename) + strlen(kernel_cmdline) + 2]; ^ hw/i386/xen/xen-hvm.c:618:25: warning: variable length array used [-Wvla] unsigned long bitmap[DIV_ROUND_UP(npages, width)]; ^ hw/intc/xics.c:604:18: warning: variable length array used [-Wvla] uint8_t flags[ics->nr_irqs]; ^ hw/net/fsl_etsec/rings.c:383:18: warning: variable length array used [-Wvla] uint8_t padd[etsec->rx_padding]; ^ hw/ppc/pnv.c:130:26: warning: variable length array used [-Wvla] uint32_t servers_prop[smt_threads]; ^ hw/ppc/spapr.c:162:26: warning: variable length array used [-Wvla] uint32_t servers_prop[smt_threads]; ^ hw/ppc/spapr.c:163:27: warning: variable length array used [-Wvla] uint32_t gservers_prop[smt_threads * 2]; ^ linux-user/syscall.c:3478:23: warning: variable length array used [-Wvla] struct sembuf sops[nsops]; ^
Should we be looking to get rid of these and turn on the -Wvla warning? I know the Linux kernel has recently decided to do this (some rationale at the start of https://lwn.net/Articles/749064/). Now that doesn't necessarily apply to us as a userspace program, but on the other hand if any of these were allowing the guest to determine the size of an on-stack array that would not be great. (The linux-user one is bogus in that way, though not a security issue as the guest code there has full control anyway.) Opinions? I admit that to some extent this is just my sense of tidiness thinking that if we only have a handful of uses of something we should squash that down to zero :-) thanks -- PMM