From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail138.messagelabs.com (mail138.messagelabs.com [216.82.249.35]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5149B6B00C8 for ; Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:02:30 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <4999C556.7010605@cs.helsinki.fi> Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:58:14 +0200 From: Pekka Enberg MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: [patch 0/8] kzfree() References: <20090216142926.440561506@cmpxchg.org> <20090216115931.12d9b7ed.akpm@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: <20090216115931.12d9b7ed.akpm@linux-foundation.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Andrew Morton Cc: Johannes Weiner , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Hi Andrew, Andrew Morton wrote: > On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:29:26 +0100 Johannes Weiner wrote: > >> This series introduces kzfree() and converts callsites which do >> memset() + kfree() explicitely. > > I dunno, this looks like putting lipstick on a pig. > > What is the point in zeroing memory just before freeing it? afacit > this is always done as a poor-man's poisoning operation. I think they do it as security paranoia to make sure other callers don't accidentally see parts of crypto keys, passwords, and such. So I don't think we can just get rid of the memsets. Pekka -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org