Re: [PATCH 2.6.17-rc6 7/9] Remove some of the kmemleak false positives

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 12/06/06, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> wrote:
> >What i'd like to see though are clear explanations about why an
> >allocation is not considered a leak, in terms of comments added to the
> >code. That will also help us reduce the number of annotations later on.
> 
> I'll document them in both Documentation/kmemleak.txt and inside the 
> code. If I implement the "any pointer inside the block" method, all 
> the memleak_padding() false positives will disappear.

i dont know - i feel uneasy about the 'any pointer' method - it has a 
high potential for false negatives, especially for structures that 
contain strings (or other random data), etc.

did you consider the tracking of the types of allocated blocks 
explicitly? I'd expect that most blocks dont have pointers embedded in 
them that point to allocated blocks. For the ones that do, the 
allocation could be extended with the type information. For each 
affected type, we could annotate the structures themselves with offset 
information. How intrusive would such a method be?

	Ingo