Re: [patch V4 01/14] cleanup: Provide retain_ptr()

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Wed, 2025-03-19 at 11:56 +0100, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> In cases where an allocation is consumed by another function, the
> allocation needs to be retained on success or freed on failure. The
> code
> pattern is usually:
> 
> 	struct foo *f = kzalloc(sizeof(*f), GFP_KERNEL);
> 	struct bar *b;
> 
> 	,,,
> 	// Initialize f
> 	...
> 	if (ret)
> 		goto free;
>         ...
> 	bar = bar_create(f);
> 	if (!bar) {
> 		ret = -ENOMEM;
> 	   	goto free;
> 	}
> 	...
> 	return 0;
> free:
> 	kfree(f);
> 	return ret;
> 
> This prevents using __free(kfree) on @f because there is no canonical
> way to tell the cleanup code that the allocation should not be freed.
> 
> Abusing no_free_ptr() by force ignoring the return value is not
> really a sensible option either.
> 
> Provide an explicit macro retain_ptr(), which NULLs the cleanup
> pointer. That makes it easy to analyze and reason about.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
> Reviewed-by: Jonathan Cameron <Jonathan.Cameron@huawei.com>
> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
> ---
> V4: Cast to void so can't be used as return_ptr() replacement - James

Reviewed-by: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>