Re: [git pull] core, x86: make LIST_POISON less deadly

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Mon Jul 14 2008 - 11:04:18 EST




On Mon, 14 Jul 2008, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> +config ILLEGAL_POINTER_VALUE
> + hex
> + default 0 if X86_32
> + default 0xffffc10000000000 if X86_64

This looks like a singularly bad pointer value on x86-64.

Why not pick something that is *guaranteed* to fault? The above looks like
any future setup that supports 41 bits of addressing and has extended the
page tables (yes, it will happen eventually) will find that to be a
perfectly valid address?

It's also visually confusing, since it's visually very close to a real
kernel pointer too.

Grr.

Why not use something sane like 0xdead000000000000, which has the high bit
set but very fundamentally isn't a valid pointer, and never will be? And
which is a *lot* more visually obvious too!

Linus
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