Re: 2.6.16-rc5-mm2 - kzalloc() considered harmful for debugging.

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Mon Dec 19 2005 - 05:20:12 EST


Valdis.Kletnieks@xxxxxx wrote:
>
> So I've got a (probably self-inflicted) memory leak in slab-64 and slab-32.
> Rebuild the kernel with CONFIG_DEBUG_SLAB, reboot, and wait for a bit of
> leak to pile up, and then echo 'slab-32 0 0 0' > /proc/slabinfo
>
> And ta-DA! the top offender is... (drum roll): <kzalloc+0xe/0x36>
>
> Blargh. It's tempting to do something like this in include/linux/slab.h:
>
> #ifdef CONFIG_SLAB_DEBUG
> static inline void* kzalloc(size_t size, gfp_t flags)
> {
> void *ret = kmalloc(size, flags);
> if (ret)
> memset(ret, 0, size);
> return ret;
> }
> #else
> extern void *kzalloc(size_t, gfp_t);
> #end

That would work.

Or we could special-case kzalloc() and kstrdup() in slab.c - use
builtin_return_address(1) if builtin_return_address(0) is within those
functions. Dunno if that's worth the fuss though.
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