Re: [GIT PULL] kmemcheck for mainline

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Fri Jun 12 2009 - 10:01:12 EST



* Pekka Enberg <penberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi Linus,
>
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 4:31 PM, Vegard Nossum<vegard.nossum@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Please consider pulling the kmemcheck tree;
> >
> > kmemcheck is a feature which can (at run-time) detect some uses of
> > uninitialized memory within the kernel, similarly to what Valgrind's memcheck
> > does for userspace programs. We also have the ability to find use-after-free
> > errors and leaks of uninitialized data to userspace, both with a false-
> > positive rate of zero.
> >
> > kmemcheck is self-contained in the sense that when CONFIG_KMEMCHECK=n, it has
> > no effect on the compiled kernel whatsoever. Our code has lived in the -tip
> > tree and been in -next for over a year, and has the acks of x86 and slab
> > maintainers (Ingo and Pekka). Inclusion in mainline would lower the threshold
> > for building and running kmemcheck-enabled kernels, which would also
> > hopefully increase testing coverage of the rest of the kernel code.
>
> I hope I didn't burn all my karma for this merge window with the slab
> early boot patches but:
>
> Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> for this pull request.

+1

I've been testing kmemcheck in -tip for 1.5 years meanwhile and in
terms of maintenance overhead it was never troublesome to have
around.

Ingo
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