Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 13:31:01 +0200
From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
To: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@gmail.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2.6.17-rc4 1/6] Base support for kmemleak
Message-ID: <20060526113101.GA19548@elte.hu>
References: <20060513155757.8848.11980.stgit@localhost.localdomain> <p73u07t5x6f.fsf@bragg.suse.de> <20060526085916.GA14388@elte.hu> <200605261139.22193.ak@suse.de>
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* Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de> wrote:

> > Also, kmemleak guarantees (assuming the implementation is correct) 
> > that if a leak happens in practice, it will be detected immediately.
> 
> Not if the slab object is reused quickly - which it often is.

I dont see how slab object reuse could cause leak detection problems - 
if something _is_ being freed, it's not a leak. What matters are the 
objects that are 'forgotten' - and (at least statistically) kmemleak 
should find them, because after some time all references to them go 
away.

on 64-bit systems the statistical likelyhood of finding a leak could be 
even increased by artificially relocating the kernel to a semi-random 
base within the 64-bit address space. (that would mean that in practice 
that all kernel pointers would be 'marked' with the top 28-32 bits that 
are a good indicator of them being a kernel pointer)

	Ingo
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