Re: [PATCH] i386, nmi: signed vs unsigned mixup

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > -ETOOTRIVIAL.  The code as-is works OK, and we have these sorts of things
>  > all over the tee.
>  >
>  Fair enough.
> 
>  Would a patch to clean this sort of stuff up in bulk all over be of
>  interrest or should I just leave it alone?

Such a patchset would be pretty intrusive and it's not exactly trivial - at
each site we need to decide whether we should be using signed or unsigned,
then change one or the other, then do a full-scope check to see what the
implications of that change are.

I think the two risks of signedness sloppiness are a) inadvertent or
premature overflow and b) comparisons, where the signed quantity went
negative.

Problem b) is more serious, and `gcc -Wsigned-compare' may be used to
identify possible problems.  There are quite a lot of places need checking,
iirc.