Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/5] do not dereference NULL pools in pools' destroy() functions

[Christoph Lameter]

On Tue, 9 Jun 2015, Andrew Morton wrote:

> Well I like it, even though it's going to cause a zillion little cleanup
> patches.
>
> checkpatch already has a "kfree(NULL) is safe and this check is
> probably not required" test so I guess Joe will need to get busy ;)
>
> I'll park these patches until after 4.1 is released - it's getting to
> that time...

Why do this at all? I understand that kfree/kmem_cache_free can take a
null pointer but this is the destruction of a cache and it usually
requires multiple actions to clean things up and these actions have to be
properly sequenced. All other processors have to stop referencing this
cache before it can be destroyed. I think failing if someone does
something strange like doing cache destruction with a NULL pointer is
valuable.

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