Catalin Marinas: Run-time kernel checking

May 22, 2014

Participants: Li Zefan

People tagged: Peter Zijlstra (lockdep), Ingo Molnar (lockdep), Paul E. McKenney (RCU), Dipankar Sarma (RCU), Vegard Nossum (kmemcheck), Pekka Enberg (kmemcheck), and Catalin Marinas (kmemleak).

Catalin Marinas would like to see a discussion of run-time checking, in particular, to get feedback from users of these tools on their usefulness, how they might be improved, and any needs for additional similar tools. Li Zefan agreed and nominated kmemleak as an additional tool. He also would like to see SMP support in kmemleak. In addition, he noted that Huawei has a simplified lockdep feature whose runtime overhead is sufficiently low to allow it to be used in production. Catalin said that kmemleak had been disabled for good reasons, and asked what features were needed.