[PATCH v2 5/5] kfence: add note to documentation about skipping covered allocations

From: Marco Elver
Date: Tue Sep 21 2021 - 06:11:36 EST


Add a note briefly mentioning the new policy about "skipping currently
covered allocations if pool close to full." Since this has a notable
impact on KFENCE's bug-detection ability on systems with large uptimes,
it is worth pointing out the feature.

Signed-off-by: Marco Elver <elver@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
v2:
* Rewrite.
---
Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst | 11 +++++++++++
1 file changed, 11 insertions(+)

diff --git a/Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst b/Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst
index 0fbe3308bf37..d45f952986ae 100644
--- a/Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst
+++ b/Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst
@@ -269,6 +269,17 @@ tail of KFENCE's freelist, so that the least recently freed objects are reused
first, and the chances of detecting use-after-frees of recently freed objects
is increased.

+If pool utilization reaches 75% (default) or above, to reduce the risk of the
+pool eventually being fully occupied by allocated objects yet ensure diverse
+coverage of allocations, KFENCE limits currently covered allocations of the
+same source from further filling up the pool. The "source" of an allocation is
+based on its partial allocation stack trace. A side-effect is that this also
+limits frequent long-lived allocations (e.g. pagecache) of the same source
+filling up the pool permanently, which is the most common risk for the pool
+becoming full and the sampled allocation rate dropping to zero. The threshold
+at which to start limiting currently covered allocations can be configured via
+the boot parameter ``kfence.skip_covered_thresh`` (pool usage%).
+
Interface
---------

--
2.33.0.464.g1972c5931b-goog