linux-kernel - Re: [git pull] RCU updates for v2.6.27

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Message-ID: <84144f020807151401s2e37b892q2df007c9e1e3464a@mail.gmail.com>
Date:	Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:01:42 +0300
From:	"Pekka Enberg" <penberg@...helsinki.fi>
To:	"Linus Torvalds" <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:	"Andrew Morton" <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>, mingo@...e.hu,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, paulmck@...ibm.com,
	a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl, "Vegard Nossum" <vegard.nossum@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [git pull] RCU updates for v2.6.27

Hi Linus,

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:38:27 -0700 (PDT)
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org> wrote:
>>> Hmm. I really wanted to wait with kmemcheck, which is huge and I'm not
>>> entirely convinced yet.

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Andrew Morton wrote:
>> Any particular concerns?

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 11:29 PM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@...ux-foundation.org> wrote:
> It's big, complex and looks fragile. And it reports lots of false
> positives, with big warnings to people to generally not use or make
> reports about itit unless they are already experts. So it looks like
> something pretty specific.
>
> I also want to feel like it actually has been helpful.

Besides catching reads to uninitialized memory, kmemcheck detects
use-after-free now and can be extended to catch red-zone overwrites
*as they happen* which will make debugging kernel memory corruptions
much easier for everybody.

There are now three commits in your tree that fix a real bug reported
by kmemcheck: 8410565f540db87ca938f56f92780d251e4f157d ("ACPICA: Fix
for access to deleted object <regression>"),
adeed48090fc370afa0db8d007748ee72a40b578 ("rc80211_pid: Fix fast_start
parameter handling"), and 62f75532b583c03840f31e40386ce2df73be9ca0
("slub: Initialize per-cpu stats").

So I think it has been helpful and that the infrastructure it adds is
valuable for future debugging aids.

                        Pekka
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