Chapter 5. Recipes for Deadlock
Prev |  | Next

# Chapter 5. Recipes for Deadlock

You cannot call any routines which may sleep, unless:

- You are in user context.

- You do not own any spinlocks.

- You have interrupts enabled (actually, Andi Kleen says that the scheduling code will enable them for you, but that's probably not what you wanted).

Note that some functions may sleep implicitly: common ones are the user space access functions (*_user) and memory allocation functions without GFP_ATOMIC.

You should always compile your kernel CONFIG_DEBUG_ATOMIC_SLEEP on, and it will warn you if you break these rules. If you do break the rules, you will eventually lock up your box.

Really.

Prev |  | Next
Chapter 4. ioctls: Not writing a new system call | Home | Chapter 6. Common Routines