In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: mm/slab: make __free(kfree) accept error pointers Currently, if an automatically freed allocation is an error pointer that will lead to a crash. An example of this is in wm831x_gpio_dbg_show(). 171 char *label __free(kfree) = gpiochip_dup_line_label(chip, i); 172 if (IS_ERR(label)) { 173 dev_err(wm831x->dev, "Failed to duplicate label\n"); 174 continue; 175 } The auto clean up function should check for error pointers as well, otherwise we're going to keep hitting issues like this.