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

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> wrote:

> > To the other extreme is Ingo's suggestion of using exact type 
> > identification but I don't think this would be acceptable for the 
> > kernel as it would to modify all the memory alloc calls in the 
> > kernel to either pass an additional parameter (the type id) or 
> > another post-allocation call to kmemleak to update the id.
> 
> passing in the type ID wouldnt be that bad and it would have other 
> advantages as well: for example we could do strict type-checking of 
> allocation size versus type-we-use-it-for.
> 
> As long as the conversion is gradual i think we could try this. I.e. 
> we'd default to 'no ID passed', and in that case we would fall back to 
> the size-based method and generate an ID out of the structure size.

update: there's also a neat gcc extension trick suggested by Arjan: 
__builtin_classify_type(). This converts types into integers!

	Ingo