specified mutex is invalid. In spec parlance 'MAY FAIL' means it's
up to the implementor. So, remove the check for NULL pointers for two
reasons:
1. A mutex may be invalid without necessarily being NULL.
2. If the pointer to the mutex is NULL core-dumping in the
vicinity of the problem is much much much better than failing
in some other part of the code (especially when the application
doesn't check the return value of the function that you oh so
helpfully set to EINVAL).