Lock-free algorithms don't usually depend on an OS being present. They could just as easily run in an environment that has no scheduler. But if the algorithm c

Lock-free algorithms don't usually depend on an OS being present. They could just as easily run in an environment that has no scheduler. But if the algorithm calls malloc, that is a hard dependency. If an algorithm depends on malloc, it needs to prove that lock-free/wait-free malloc() exists before calling itself lock/wait-free.