On Tue, 3 Nov 2020 18:58:32 +0100 Marco Elver <el...@google.com> wrote:
> This adds the Kernel Electric-Fence (KFENCE) infrastructure. KFENCE is a > low-overhead sampling-based memory safety error detector of heap > use-after-free, invalid-free, and out-of-bounds access errors. This > series enables KFENCE for the x86 and arm64 architectures, and adds > KFENCE hooks to the SLAB and SLUB allocators. > > KFENCE is designed to be enabled in production kernels, and has near > zero performance overhead. Compared to KASAN, KFENCE trades performance > for precision. The main motivation behind KFENCE's design, is that with > enough total uptime KFENCE will detect bugs in code paths not typically > exercised by non-production test workloads. One way to quickly achieve a > large enough total uptime is when the tool is deployed across a large > fleet of machines. Has kfence detected any kernel bugs yet? What is its track record? Will a kfence merge permit us to remove some other memory debugging subsystem? We seem to have rather a lot of them.