Re: [PATCH v3 11/13] kmemleak: disable kasan instrumentation for kmemleak

[Catalin Marinas]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 03:10:01PM +0100, Dmitry Vyukov wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 9:36 PM, Andrey Ryabinin <ryabinin.a.a@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 2014-09-26 21:10 GMT+04:00 Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> >> Looks good to me.
> >>
> >> We can disable kasan instrumentation of this file as well.
> >
> > Yes, but why? I don't think we need that.
> 
> Just gut feeling. Such tools usually don't play well together. For
> example, due to asan quarantine lots of leaks will be missed (if we
> pretend that tools work together, end users will use them together and
> miss bugs). I won't be surprised if leak detector touches freed
> objects under some circumstances as well.
> We can do this if/when discover actual compatibility issues, of course.

I think it's worth testing them together first.

One issue, as mentioned in the patch log, is that the size information
that kmemleak gets is the one from the kmem_cache object rather than the
original allocation size, so this would be rounded up.

Kmemleak should not touch freed objects (if an object is freed during a
scan, it is protected by some lock until the scan completes). There is a
bug however which I haven't got to fixing it yet, if kmemleak fails for
some reason (cannot allocate memory) and disables itself, it may access
some freed object (though usually hard to trigger).

-- 
Catalin
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/