Author: Julia Lawall <Julia.Lawall@lip6.fr> Netdev_priv performs an addition, not a pointer dereference, so it seems quite unlikely that its result would ever be NULL. A semantic patch that makes this change is as follows: (http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/) // @@ statement S; @@ – if (!netdev_priv(…)) S // Signed-off-by: Julia Lawall Acked-by: Grant Grundler Signed-off-by: David S. Miller …