On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 11:53:50AM -0700, Joe Perches wrote: > To this larger audience and last week without reply: > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/573b3fbd5927c643920e1364230c296b23e7584d.camel@xxxxxxxxxxx/ > > Are there _any_ fastpath uses of kfree or vfree? I worked on adding a 'free' a couple of years ago. That was capable of freeing percpu, vmalloc, kmalloc and alloc_pages memory. I ran into trouble when I tried to free kmem_cache_alloc memory -- it works for slab and slub, but not slob (because slob needs the size from the kmem_cache). My motivation for this was to change kfree_rcu() to just free_rcu(). > To eliminate these mispairings at a runtime cost of four > comparisons, should the kfree/vfree/kvfree/kfree_const > functions be consolidated into a single kfree? I would say to leave kfree() alone and just introduce free() as a new default. There's some weird places in the kernel that have a 'free' symbol of their own, but those should be renamed anyway.
