An interesting warning

Hal Murray hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Mon Nov 30 10:49:55 UTC 2015


It's from Debian wheezy (and decendents like Rasbian)
gcc (Debian 4.7.2-5) 4.7.2

[109/174] Compiling ntpd/ntp_io.c
../ntpd/ntp_io.c: In function ‘process_routing_msgs’:
../ntpd/ntp_io.c:4629:7: warning: comparison between signed and unsigned 
integer expressions [-Wsign-compare]

That line of code is:
             NLMSG_OK(nh, cnt);
It's the middle term in a for loop.

nh is a pointer, cnt is an int.

NLMSG_OK comes from /usr/include/linux/netlink.h
#define NLMSG_OK(nlh,len) ((len) >= (int)sizeof(struct nlmsghdr) && \
                           (nlh)->nlmsg_len >= sizeof(struct nlmsghdr) && \
                           (nlh)->nlmsg_len <= (len))
nlmsg_len comes from a struct nlmsghdr:
        __u32           nlmsg_len;      /* Length of message including header 
*/

That part of the header didn't change from wheezy to jessie.

The 3rd term is comparing an unsigned with an int.  So the real question is 
why the compiler on other systems don't complain.

Is there a clean fix for this, or do we just document it as a glitch in this 
environment?




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