Re: [PATCH v10 3/3] mm: add anonymous vma name refcounting

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Mon Oct 11 2021 - 04:36:09 EST


On Fri 08-10-21 13:58:01, Kees Cook wrote:
> - Strings for "anon" specifically have no required format (this is good)
> it's informational like the task_struct::comm and can (roughly)
> anything. There's no naming convention for memfds, AF_UNIX, etc. Why
> is one needed here? That seems like a completely unreasonable
> requirement.

I might be misreading the justification for the feature. Patch 2 is
talking about tools that need to understand memeory usage to make
further actions. Also Suren was suggesting "numbering convetion" as an
argument against.

So can we get a clear example how is this being used actually? If this
is just to be used to debug by humans than I can see an argument for
human readable form. If this is, however, meant to be used by tools to
make some actions then the argument for strings is much weaker.
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs