On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, P Lavin wrote:
> Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 12:45:01 +0530
> From: P Lavin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Subject: Re: no need to check for NULL before calling kfree() -fs/ext2/
>
> Hi,
> In my wlan driver module, i allocated some memory using kmalloc in interrupt
> context, this one failed but its not returning NULL ,
kmalloc() should always return NULL if the allocation failed.
>so i was proceeding
> further everything was going wrong... & finally the kernel crahed. Can any one
> of you tell me why this is happening ? i cannot use GFP_KERNEL because i'm
> calling this function from interrupt context & it may block. Any other
If you need to allocate memory from interrupt context you should be using
GFP_ATOMIC (or, if possible, do the allocation earlier in a different
context).
> solution for this ?? I'm concerned abt why kmalloc is not returning null if
> its not a success ??
>
I have no explanation for that, are you sure that's really what's
happening?
> Is it not necessary to check for NULL before calling kfree() ??
No, it is not nessesary to check for NULL before calling kfree() since
kfree() does
void kfree (const void *objp)
{
...
if (!objp)
return;
...
}
So, if you pass kfree() a NULL pointer it deals with it itself, you don't
need to check that explicitly before calling kfree() - that's redundant.
--
Jesper Juhl
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
