From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261788AbUKUS4z (ORCPT ); Sun, 21 Nov 2004 13:56:55 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261787AbUKUS4z (ORCPT ); Sun, 21 Nov 2004 13:56:55 -0500 Received: from dbl.q-ag.de ([213.172.117.3]:58264 "EHLO dbl.q-ag.de") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261788AbUKUS4t (ORCPT ); Sun, 21 Nov 2004 13:56:49 -0500 Message-ID: <41A0E4E9.3040902@colorfullife.com> Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2004 19:56:41 +0100 From: Manfred Spraul User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; fr-FR; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040922 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Peter T. Breuer" CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: can kfree sleep? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi Peter, >Just a question: can kfree sleep? > > > > No, it never sleeps. It's safe to call kfree from arbitrary context. The only exception is the NMI oopser and similar arch code. >I believe so, but slab.c does not enlighten me immediately: > > Yes, the kfree code is quite long - it must check if freeing one object created a freeable page and return it to the page allocator. Together with lots of caching and debug checks. -- Manfred