work namespace, that means the timewait sockets stay alive while the network namespace dies. The timewait sockets are for avoiding to receive a duplicate packet from the network, if the network namespace is freed, the network stack is removed, so no chance to receive any packets from the outside world. Furthermore, having a pending destruction timer on these sockets with a network namespace freed is not safe and will lead to an oops if the timer callback which try to access data belonging to the namespace like for example in: inet_twdr_do_twkill_work -> NET_INC_STATS_BH(twsk_net(tw), LINUX_MIB_TIMEWAITED); Purging the timewait sockets at the network namespace destruction will: 1) speed up memory freeing for the namespace 2) fix kernel panic on asynchronous timewait destruction Signed-off-by: Daniel Lezcano Acked-by: Denis V. Lunev Acked-by: Eric W. Biederman Signed-off-by: David S. Miller _