These patches are often correct in the same way a stopped clock is correct twice a day, but I reject the motivation/approach/patch description. Just because there is a sanity check does not mean we should use it (ie, do an insane thing). It hurts readability to hide the NULL check. On the other hand, half the time the NULL checks are superflous because the pointer is never NULL. The other half of the time the NULL checks are there because the code uses one err style error handling. Also the error handling code should mirror the allocation code so I feel like it should be: if (some_feature) foo = allocate(); ret = frob(); if (ret) goto free_foo; free_foo: if (some_feature) // <--- as opposed to if (foo) { free(foo); So anyway I often don't like the original code, but the new code is even worse and I have never heard a good motivation for these patches besides that they were generated using a cool tool. It's not a good reason. Other maintainers are accepting these patches so you are free to send them there. regards, dan carpenter -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kernel-janitors" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html