Re: [PATCH v2 2/5] kmemleak: add clear command support

From: Luis R. Rodriguez
Date: Fri Sep 04 2009 - 16:27:01 EST


On Thu, Sep 03, 2009 at 09:52:11AM -0700, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 01:35 -0400, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
> > In an ideal world your kmemleak output will be small,
> > when its not you can use the clear command to ingore previously
> > annotated kmemleak objects. We do this by painting them black.
>
> Making the objects "black" means that they are completely ignored by
> kmemleak and they are assumed not to contain any valid references.
> Therefore they won't be scanned and many of the newly allocated objects
> would be false positives.

Got it, BTW can you elaborate as to why painting objects black would
create false positives for newly allocated objects? I fail to understand
why.

> You may want to make them "gray" and only those which were reported as
> unreferenced, something like below:
>
> if ((object->flags & OBJECT_REPORTED) && unreferenced_object(object))
> make_gray_object(object->pointer)

Thanks, will use this.

Luis
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