Avoiding page reference-count overflows

Posted Apr 16, 2019 10:49 UTC (Tue) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958)
In reply to: Avoiding page reference-count overflows by eru
Parent article: Avoiding page reference-count overflows

I agree with you, but I don't know how the "getting stuck" is handled, perhaps it triggers some special handling to free the resource.

Anyone knows more?

refcount_t

Posted Apr 16, 2019 12:57 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Once a refcount_t value hits its max, it will no longer be changed — it gets "stuck". Any resource controlled by that count will then never be freed. A resource leak is considered to be less threatening than a premature free. More information in this article and this one.