"I skipped the public announcements for versions 5 and 6, but here is 7 :)," noted Vegard Nossum, announcing the latest release of his kmemcheck patch, currently applying against the 2.6.25-rc8 kernel. Vegard noted he is now hoping to get the patch merged into the mainline kernel during the upcoming 2.6.26 merge window. He described the patch:
"kmemcheck is a patch to the linux kernel that detects use of uninitialized memory. It does this by trapping every read and write to memory that was allocated dynamically (e.g. using kmalloc()). If a memory address is read that has not previously been written to, a message is printed to the kernel log."
Among the changes compared to earlier releases, v7 has undergone a lot of cleanup, some preparation has begun for an x86_64 port, error reporting stability has been improved, boot time and run time options have been added, and there have been several bug fixes.
From: Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@...>
Subject: [ANNOUNCE] kmemcheck v7
[0]Date: Apr 4, 9:44 am 2008
Hi,
I skipped the public announcements for versions 5 and 6, but here is 7 :)
General description: kmemcheck is a patch to the linux kernel that
detects use of uninitialized memory. It does this by trapping every
read and write to memory that was allocated dynamically (e.g. using
kmalloc()). If a memory address is read that has not previously been
written to, a message is printed to the kernel log.
Changes since v4 (rough list):
- SLUB parts were broken-out into its own file to avoid cluttering the main
SLUB code.
- A rather lot of cleanups, including removing #ifdefs from arch code.
- Some preparation in anticipation of an x86_64 port.
- Make reporting safer by using a periodic timer to inspect the error queue.
- Fix hang due to page flags changing too early on free().
- Fix hang due to kprobes incompatibility.
- Allow CONFIG_SMP, but limit number of CPUs to 1 at run-time.
- Add kmemcheck=0|1 boot option.
- Add /proc/sys/kernel/kmemcheck for run-time enabling/disabling.
These patches apply to Linus's v2.6.25-rc8. The latest patchset can also be
found here: http://folk.uio.no/vegardno/linux/kmemcheck/ [1]
(I will try to submit this for inclusion in 2.6.26, and testing and feedback
is of course very welcome!)
I would like to thank the following people, who provided patches or helped
in various ways:
Ingo Molnar
Paul McKenney
Pekka Enberg
Pekka Paalanen
Peter Zijlstra
Randy Dunlap
Kind regards,
Vegard Nossum
--
Related links:
- Archive of above thread [1]
