Re: Valgrinding the kernel?

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>]

Dan Kegel wrote:
> It'd be nice to see if Valgrind could catch uninitialized
> references in the kernel, if only to see if Coverity is
> missing anything that happens in practice.
>
> Back in December 2002, Valgrind started to run UML:
> http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/diary.html
> http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=104035199923121&w=2
> but it wasn't quite usable, and it seems broken since then.
> The last note I could find about this was from Jeff In July 2005:
> http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=112273702329952&w=2
>
> Has there been any motion since then? 

Not that I know of.  I think all the pieces are in place now.  The 
original problem was that Valgrind didn't deal with clone and didn't 
have accurate signal support.  I fixed that.  Then the problem was 
dealing with the densely packed small kernel stacks.  Valgrind now has a 
way of registering stack regions, so that it can distinguish between a 
stack switch and a normal function call.

So, I think all it needs now is to scatter some valgrind client requests 
around the kernel and give it a spin.  See, simple ;)

    J