>> If you would dare to follow advice from goto chains in a strict way, >> I imagine that you can tend to stress the attention for more useful >> data processing a bit more than such a redundant function call. > > It's about maintainability and simplicity. Eliminating kfree(NULL) > doesn't simplify most code, I find it easy to avoid such a call in the affected and concrete function implementation. > it just makes the exit paths more complex Where is undesirable software complexity here in the repositioning of the label “simple_populate” before the statement “buf = NULL;”? Regards, Markus