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Revision 92e4b519

ID92e4b519e0808948ae4bc710fb1db7d3cc2245a1

Added by David Gibson about 12 years ago

kvm: Comparison with ioctl number macros needs to be unsigned

In kvm-all.c we store an ioctl cmd number in the irqchip_inject_ioctl field
of KVMState, which has type 'int'. This seems to make sense since the
ioctl() man page says that the cmd parameter has type int.

However, the kernel treats ioctl numbers as unsigned - sys_ioctl() takes an
unsigned int, and the macros which generate ioctl numbers expand to
unsigned expressions. Furthermore, some ioctls (IOC_READ ioctls on x86
and IOC_WRITE ioctls on powerpc) have bit 31 set, and so would be negative
if interpreted as an int. This has the surprising and compile-breaking
consequence that in kvm_irqchip_set_irq() where we do:
return (s->irqchip_inject_ioctl == KVM_IRQ_LINE) ? 1 : event.status;
We will get a "comparison is always false due to limited range of data
type" warning from gcc if KVM_IRQ_LINE is one of the bit-31-set ioctls,
which it is on powerpc.

So, despite the fact that the man page and posix say ioctl numbers are
signed, they're actually unsigned. The kernel uses unsigned, the glibc
header uses unsigned long, and FreeBSD, NetBSD and OSX also use unsigned
long ioctl numbers in the code.

Therefore, this patch changes the variable to be unsigned, fixing the
compile.

Signed-off-by: David Gibson <>
Signed-off-by: Alexander Graf <>

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