Hi,

In general it is not wrong to directly free mbufs from another thread assuming it is not freed twice in both threads. But a safer way for your purpose is to create shared ring buffer between these two threads. You can pass pointers of obtained mbufs from the receiving thread to the processing thread, then get the processing status back also via the ring buffer and safely free them in the same receiving thread.

Cheers,
Tao

From: Szokovacs Robert <robert.szokovacs@gamma.co.uk>
Date: Monday, 8. April 2024 at 15:25
To: users@dpdk.org <users@dpdk.org>
Subject: Memorymanagement vs thread safety

Hello,

In may application, I use separate threads to process the packets received (write them to disk or respond to them). I could not confirm to myself that is is safe to free (using rte_pktmbuf_free
) the memory returned by rte_eth_rx_burst() from a different thread than the one it was called in. Anybody can help me with this?

Thank you!

br

Szo

Robert Szokovacs

Software Developer

Tel:	0333 240 3276
Email:	Robert.Szokovacs@gamma.co.uk

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