On Mon, 26 Jan 2015, Vladimir Davydov wrote: > Right, but I just don't see why a subsystem using a kmem_cache would > need to check whether there are any objects left in the cache. I mean, > it should somehow keep track of the objects it's allocated anyway, e.g. > by linking them in a list. That means it must already have a way to > check if it is safe to destroy its cache or not. The acpi subsystem did that at some point. > Suppose we leave the return value as is. A subsystem, right before going > to destroy a cache, calls kmem_cache_shrink, which returns 1 (slab is > not empty). What is it supposed to do then? That is up to the subsystem. If it has a means of tracking down the missing object then it can deal with it. If not then it cannot shutdown the cache and do a proper recovery action. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>