When allocating dynamic major, the minor range overlap check in __register_chrdev_region() will not fail, so actually there is no real case to passing non negative error code to caller. However, set variable ret to -EBUSY before checking minor range overlap will avoid false-positive warning from code analyzing tool(like Smatch) and also make the code more easy to understand. Suggested-by: Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Chengguang Xu <cgxu519@xxxxxxxxx> --- v1->v2: - Rebase against the latest char-misc-next. - Modify signed-off mail address. fs/char_dev.c | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/fs/char_dev.c b/fs/char_dev.c index d18cad28c1c3..00dfe17871ac 100644 --- a/fs/char_dev.c +++ b/fs/char_dev.c @@ -98,7 +98,7 @@ __register_chrdev_region(unsigned int major, unsigned int baseminor, int minorct, const char *name) { struct char_device_struct *cd, *curr, *prev = NULL; - int ret = -EBUSY; + int ret; int i; if (major >= CHRDEV_MAJOR_MAX) { @@ -129,6 +129,7 @@ __register_chrdev_region(unsigned int major, unsigned int baseminor, major = ret; } + ret = -EBUSY; i = major_to_index(major); for (curr = chrdevs[i]; curr; prev = curr, curr = curr->next) { if (curr->major < major) -- 2.17.2