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Asked: 2026-05-16T10:39:19+00:00

In an operating systems course I took a while ago we were working on

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In an operating systems course I took a while ago we were working on an old, non-preemptive kernel of Linux (2.4.X). However, we were told that there could be multiple control paths in the kernel simultaneously. Doesn’t that contradict the non-preemptive nature of the kernel?
EDIT: I mean, there is no context switch inside the kernel. Last time I tried asking this question I got the response “well, the Linux kernel is preemptive, so there’s no problem”.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Within the 2.4 kernel, although kernel code could not be arbitrarily pre-empted by other kernel code, kernel code could still voluntarily give up the CPU by sleeping (this is obviously quite a common case).

    In addition, kernel code could always be pre-empted by interrupt handlers (unless it specifically disabled interrupts), and the 2.4 kernel also supported SMP, allowing multiple CPUs to be executing within the kernel simultaneously.

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