Re: Can kfree() sleep at runtime?

[Christopher Lameter]

On Thu, 31 May 2018, Matthew Wilcox wrote:

> On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 09:10:07PM +0800, Jia-Ju Bai wrote:
> > I write a static analysis tool (DSAC), and it finds that kfree() can sleep.
> >
> > Here is the call path for kfree().
> > Please look at it *from the bottom up*.
> >
> > [FUNC] alloc_pages(GFP_KERNEL)
> > arch/x86/mm/pageattr.c, 756: alloc_pages in split_large_page
> > arch/x86/mm/pageattr.c, 1283: split_large_page in __change_page_attr
>
> Here's your bug.  Coming from kfree(), we can't end up in the
> split_large_page() path.  __change_page_attr may be called in several
> different circumstances in which it would have to split a large page,
> but the path from kfree() is not one of them.

Freeing a page in the page allocator also was traditionally not sleeping.
That has changed?