might_sleep(9)

💖 NAME 💖

might_sleep — annotation for functions that can sleep 😴✨

hey bestie, welcome to the Kernel API Manual page for might_sleep(9) — we're keeping it cute and keeping every fact, periodt 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

might_sleep

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so here's the vibe: might_sleep is a macro, and if it runs in an atomic context — think a spinlock, an irq-handler, ... — that whole situation — it will print a stack trace 😭🔥. Like, not me catching you trying to block where blocking is literally not allowed.

if you have additional sections where blocking is not allowed, you can annotate them with non_block_start and non_block_end pairs 🫶.

this is such a useful debugging help, no cap: it lets you catch problems early and avoids getting bitten later when the calling function happens to sleep when it is not supposed to 💀💅.

🌸 SEE ALSO 🌸

• Kernel file ./include/linux/kernel.h
• cant_sleep(9)
• cant_migrate(9)
• non_block_start(9)
• non_block_end(9)
• enum system_states(9)

mwah 💋 source/version cutie: ./include/linux; date: October 2026; page: might_sleep(9) — signing off, slay and read your kernel headers 🎀✨