mm: more intensive memory corruption debugging
authorStanislaw Gruszka <sgruszka@redhat.com>
Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:07:28 +0000 (15:07 -0800)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:30:42 +0000 (16:30 -0800)
commitc0a32fc5a2e470d0b02597b23ad79a317735253e
tree2d164edae0062918ca2088772c00b0615781353b
parent1399ff86f2a2bbacbbe68fa00c5f8c752b344723
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