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Message-ID: <19f34abd0807171705h31595809y944792ce697bede7@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:05:39 +0200
From: "Vegard Nossum" <vegard.nossum@...il.com>
To: "Ingo Molnar" <mingo@...e.hu>
Cc: linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, netdev@...r.kernel.org,
"Pekka Enberg" <penberg@...helsinki.fi>,
"Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@...k.pl>
Subject: Re: [bug, netconsole, SLUB] BUG skbuff_head_cache: Poison overwritten
On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 1:52 AM, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu> wrote:
> If only we had some kernel technology that could track and validate
> memory accesses, and point out the cases where we access uninitialized
> memory, just like Valgrind?
>
> ... something like kmemcheck? ;-)
Cool :)
> So i booted that box with tip/master and kmemcheck enabled. (plus a few
> fixlets to make networking allocations be properly tracked by
> kmemcheck.)
>
> It was a slow bootup and long wait, but it gave a few hits here:
Hm, if you think it was that slow, I am suspecting you were also using
SLUB debugging.
This can actually be negative, since now SLUB will access the objects
(+redzone +padding) and possibly trick kmemcheck into thinking they
were initialized in the first place.
But what we are really looking for is "read from freed memory"
messages. So I would actually recommend this: Disable kmemcheck's
reporting of uninitialized memory, simply to make it easier to spot
the "freed" messages more easily.
Maybe something like this (warning: whitespace-munged):
diff --git a/arch/x86/mm/kmemcheck/error.c b/arch/x86/mm/kmemcheck/error.c
index 56410c6..6944cb7 100644
--- a/arch/x86/mm/kmemcheck/error.c
+++ b/arch/x86/mm/kmemcheck/error.c
@@ -98,6 +98,9 @@ void kmemcheck_error_save(enum kmemcheck_shadow state,
return;
prev_ip = regs->ip;
+ if (state == KMEMCHECK_SHADOW_UNINITIALIZED)
+ return;
+
e = error_next_wr();
if (!e)
return;
If this only happens during boot, it would also be a good idea to
simply reboot the machine a lot...
Vegard
--
"The animistic metaphor of the bug that maliciously sneaked in while
the programmer was not looking is intellectually dishonest as it
disguises that the error is the programmer's own creation."
-- E. W. Dijkstra, EWD1036
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