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authorJohannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>2012-05-07 15:39:06 +0200
committerDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>2012-05-07 19:21:29 -0400
commit1c430a727fa512500a422ffe4712166c550ea06a (patch)
tree5027e4edc9c66a9e49e0e73ba866f5bb326fadcd /include
parent6eddcb4c82883451aec3be1240f17793370fa62f (diff)
net: compare_ether_addr[_64bits]() has no ordering
Neither compare_ether_addr() nor compare_ether_addr_64bits() (as it can fall back to the former) have comparison semantics like memcmp() where the sign of the return value indicates sort order. We had a bug in the wireless code due to a blind memcmp replacement because of this. A cursory look suggests that the wireless bug was the only one due to this semantic difference. Signed-off-by: Johannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Diffstat (limited to 'include')
-rw-r--r--include/linux/etherdevice.h11
1 files changed, 6 insertions, 5 deletions
diff --git a/include/linux/etherdevice.h b/include/linux/etherdevice.h
index 8a1835855fa..fe5136d8145 100644
--- a/include/linux/etherdevice.h
+++ b/include/linux/etherdevice.h
@@ -159,7 +159,8 @@ static inline void eth_hw_addr_random(struct net_device *dev)
* @addr1: Pointer to a six-byte array containing the Ethernet address
* @addr2: Pointer other six-byte array containing the Ethernet address
*
- * Compare two ethernet addresses, returns 0 if equal
+ * Compare two ethernet addresses, returns 0 if equal, non-zero otherwise.
+ * Unlike memcmp(), it doesn't return a value suitable for sorting.
*/
static inline unsigned compare_ether_addr(const u8 *addr1, const u8 *addr2)
{
@@ -184,10 +185,10 @@ static inline unsigned long zap_last_2bytes(unsigned long value)
* @addr1: Pointer to an array of 8 bytes
* @addr2: Pointer to an other array of 8 bytes
*
- * Compare two ethernet addresses, returns 0 if equal.
- * Same result than "memcmp(addr1, addr2, ETH_ALEN)" but without conditional
- * branches, and possibly long word memory accesses on CPU allowing cheap
- * unaligned memory reads.
+ * Compare two ethernet addresses, returns 0 if equal, non-zero otherwise.
+ * Unlike memcmp(), it doesn't return a value suitable for sorting.
+ * The function doesn't need any conditional branches and possibly uses
+ * word memory accesses on CPU allowing cheap unaligned memory reads.
* arrays = { byte1, byte2, byte3, byte4, byte6, byte7, pad1, pad2}
*
* Please note that alignment of addr1 & addr2 is only guaranted to be 16 bits.