mm: more intensive memory corruption debugging
authorStanislaw Gruszka <sgruszka@redhat.com>
Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:07:28 +0000 (15:07 -0800)
committerGrazvydas Ignotas <notasas@gmail.com>
Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:04:17 +0000 (18:04 +0200)
commitfbebfc962331545000b838b56b842f27d22d6ae9
tree57c1de98cff6760f1482d626c638e5ae90184774
parent66d278652c3c099acb9d786bce62ff8f9fc53e93
mm: more intensive memory corruption debugging

With CONFIG_DEBUG_PAGEALLOC configured, the CPU will generate an exception
on access (read,write) to an unallocated page, which permits us to catch
code which corrupts memory.  However the kernel is trying to maximise
memory usage, hence there are usually few free pages in the system and
buggy code usually corrupts some crucial data.

This patch changes the buddy allocator to keep more free/protected pages
and to interlace free/protected and allocated pages to increase the
probability of catching corruption.

When the kernel is compiled with CONFIG_DEBUG_PAGEALLOC,
debug_guardpage_minorder defines the minimum order used by the page
allocator to grant a request.  The requested size will be returned with
the remaining pages used as guard pages.

The default value of debug_guardpage_minorder is zero: no change from
current behaviour.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: tweak documentation, s/flg/flag/]
Signed-off-by: Stanislaw Gruszka <sgruszka@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
include/linux/mm.h
include/linux/page-debug-flags.h
mm/Kconfig.debug
mm/page_alloc.c