[patch 209/262] kfence: add note to documentation about skipping covered allocations

Andrew Morton
2021-11-05T20:45:40Z

From: Marco Elver <elver@google.com>
Subject: kfence: add note to documentation about skipping covered allocations

Add a note briefly mentioning the new policy about "skipping currently
covered allocations if pool close to full." Since this has a notable
impact on KFENCE's bug-detection ability on systems with large uptimes, it
is worth pointing out the feature.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210923104803.2620285-5-elver@google.com
Signed-off-by: Marco Elver <elver@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com>
Acked-by: Alexander Potapenko <glider@google.com>
Cc: Aleksandr Nogikh <nogikh@google.com>
Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Cc: Taras Madan <tarasmadan@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
---

Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst | 11 +++++++++++
1 file changed, 11 insertions(+)

--- a/Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst~kfence-add-note-to-documentation-about-skipping-covered-allocations
+++ a/Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst
@@ -269,6 +269,17 @@ tail of KFENCE's freelist, so that the l
first, and the chances of detecting use-after-frees of recently freed objects
is increased.

+If pool utilization reaches 75% (default) or above, to reduce the risk of the
+pool eventually being fully occupied by allocated objects yet ensure diverse
+coverage of allocations, KFENCE limits currently covered allocations of the
+same source from further filling up the pool. The "source" of an allocation is
+based on its partial allocation stack trace. A side-effect is that this also
+limits frequent long-lived allocations (e.g. pagecache) of the same source
+filling up the pool permanently, which is the most common risk for the pool
+becoming full and the sampled allocation rate dropping to zero. The threshold
+at which to start limiting currently covered allocations can be configured via
+the boot parameter ``kfence.skip_covered_thresh`` (pool usage%).
+
Interface
---------

_