Re: [PATCH] atm/nicstar: remove a bunch of pointless casts of NULL

[Jesper Juhl <juhl-lkml@dif.dk>]

On Wed, 11 May 2005, Alexey Dobriyan wrote:

> On Wednesday 11 May 2005 00:06, Jesper Juhl wrote:
> > It doesn't make sense to cast NULL. This patch removes the pointless casts 
> > from drivers/atm/nicstar.c
> 
> > --- linux-2.6.12-rc3-mm3-orig/drivers/atm/nicstar.c
> > +++ linux-2.6.12-rc3-mm3/drivers/atm/nicstar.c
> 
> >     scq = (scq_info *) kmalloc(sizeof(scq_info), GFP_KERNEL);
>             ^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > -   if (scq == (scq_info *) NULL)
> > -      return (scq_info *) NULL;
> > +   if (scq == NULL)
> > +      return NULL;
> 
> >     scq->skb = (struct sk_buff **) kmalloc(sizeof(struct sk_buff *) *
>                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >                                            (size / NS_SCQE_SIZE), GFP_KERNEL);
> > -   if (scq->skb == (struct sk_buff **) NULL)
> > +   if (scq->skb == NULL)
> 
> These are pointless too.
> 
True, but I wanted the patch to only do a single well defined thing. I was 
not 100% sure what the reaction to such a patch would be, so I didn't want 
to mix other things in as well...  Actually, thinking about it a bit; will 
gcc ever generate different code for NULL pointers cast to different 
types? As far as I know it won't, but if it will, then the casts could 
actually make sense.

I can submit a second patch to remove the casts of kmalloc return values if 
wanted.

-- 
Jesper