Re: should free() refer to posix_memalign?

["Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)" <alx.manpages@gmail.com>]

Hi Jonny,

On 10/8/21 1:19 PM, Jonny Grant wrote:
> Hello
> 
> https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/malloc.3.html
> 
> "The free() function frees the memory space pointed to by ptr,
>   which must have been returned by a previous call to malloc(),
>   calloc(), or realloc().  "
> 

Agree that this is somewhat wrong.

> 
> Could this list refer to the other ways memory can be allocated too? free() accepts other memory.
> posix_memalign
> aligned_alloc
> memalign
> valloc
> pvalloc
> reallocarray
> 
> That would be changing it to say :-
> 
> "The free() function frees the memory space pointed to by ptr,
>   which must have been returned by a previous call to malloc(),
>   calloc(), realloc(), posix_memalign(), aligned_alloc(), memalign(), valloc(), reallocarray() or pvalloc()"

I don't like that list.  It is incomplete (the first one that comes to 
my mind is asprintf(3)).  Either we provide a _complete_ list of 
functions that can be free(3)d, which I think will be difficult to keep 
up to date, or we use the same wording as POSIX, and say that it 
deallocates memory allocated as if by malloc(3).


What are your thoughts?

Thanks,

Alex

-- 
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/