From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@oracle.com>
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2016 19:20:24 +0000
Subject: Re: [patch] [media] uvcvideo: freeing an error pointer
Message-Id: <20161125192024.GI6266@mwanda>
List-Id: <kernel-janitors.vger.kernel.org>
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To: Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>
Cc: wharms@bfs.de, linux-media@vger.kernel.org, kernel-janitors@vger.kernel.org, Sakari Alius <sakari.ailus@iki.fi>

On Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 06:02:45PM +0200, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> Sakari Ailus (CC'ed) has expressed the opinion that we might want to go one 
> step further and treat error pointers the same way we treat NULL or ZERO 
> pointers today, by just returning without logging anything. The reasoning is 
> that accepting a NULL pointer in kfree() was decided before we made extensive 
> use of allocation APIs returning error pointers, so it could be time to update 
> kfree() based on the current allocation usage patterns.

Just don't free things that haven't been allocated.  That honestly seems
like a simple rule to me, whenever I touch error handling code it feels
better and simpler after I fix the bugs.  Error handling doesn't have to
be complicated if you just follow the rules.

regards,
dan carpenter