1 Commits (8e4a718ff38d8539938ec3421935904c27e00c39)

Author	SHA1	Message	Date
Thomas Gleixner	3ac7fe5a4a	infrastructure to debug (dynamic) objects ... We can see an ever repeating problem pattern with objects of any kind in the kernel: 1) freeing of active objects 2) reinitialization of active objects Both problems can be hard to debug because the crash happens at a point where we have no chance to decode the root cause anymore. One problem spot are kernel timers, where the detection of the problem often happens in interrupt context and usually causes the machine to panic. While working on a timer related bug report I had to hack specialized code into the timer subsystem to get a reasonable hint for the root cause. This debug hack was fine for temporary use, but far from a mergeable solution due to the intrusiveness into the timer code. The code further lacked the ability to detect and report the root cause instantly and keep the system operational. Keeping the system operational is important to get hold of the debug information without special debugging aids like serial consoles and special knowledge of the bug reporter. The problems described above are not restricted to timers, but timers tend to expose it usually in a full system crash. Other objects are less explosive, but the symptoms caused by such mistakes can be even harder to debug. Instead of creating specialized debugging code for the timer subsystem a generic infrastructure is created which allows developers to verify their code and provides an easy to enable debug facility for users in case of trouble. The debugobjects core code keeps track of operations on static and dynamic objects by inserting them into a hashed list and sanity checking them on object operations and provides additional checks whenever kernel memory is freed. The tracked object operations are: - initializing an object - adding an object to a subsystem list - deleting an object from a subsystem list Each operation is sanity checked before the operation is executed and the subsystem specific code can provide a fixup function which allows to prevent the damage of the operation. When the sanity check triggers a warning message and a stack trace is printed. The list of operations can be extended if the need arises. For now it's limited to the requirements of the first user (timers). The core code enqueues the objects into hash buckets. The hash index is generated from the address of the object to simplify the lookup for the check on kfree/vfree. Each bucket has it's own spinlock to avoid contention on a global lock. The debug code can be compiled in without being active. The runtime overhead is minimal and could be optimized by asm alternatives. A kernel command line option enables the debugging code. Thanks to Ingo Molnar for review, suggestions and cleanup patches. Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Cc: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> Cc: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com> Cc: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>	17 years ago