Re: [PATCH 00/61] treewide: Use IS_ERR_OR_NULL over manual NULL check - refactor

Theodore Tso
2026-03-10T14:24:50Z

On Tue, Mar 10, 2026 at 12:48:26PM +0100, Philipp Hahn wrote:
> While doing some static code analysis I stumbled over a common pattern,
> where IS_ERR() is combined with a NULL check. For that there is
> IS_ERR_OR_NULL().
>
> I've written a Coccinelle patch to find and patch those instances.
> The patches follow grouped by subsystem.

I'm going to gently suggest that you *not* try to do this as a
tree-wide change, since we don't need to change some interface
requiring a global, flag day change. This is instead a cleanup, which
maybe makes the code slightly better, but which also has a the
downside of breaking lots of inflight development patches by
potentially causing merge or patch conflicts.

So why don't you send it to each subsystem as a separate patch or
small patch series, instead of spamming a dozen-plus mailing lists,
are probably hundreds of developers, most of whom aren't going to
care about changs in some far flung part of the kernel?

Regards,

- Ted