Re: Recording allocation location for blocks of memory?

["Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@kernel.org>]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 07:40:19PM +0100, Dmitry Vyukov wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 6:58 PM Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hello!
> >
> > I have vague memories of some facility some time some where that recorded
> > who allocated a given block of memory, but am not seeing anything that
> > does this at present.  The problem is rare enough and the situation
> > sufficiently performance-sensitive that things like ftrace need not apply,
> > and the BPF guys suggest that BPF might not be the best tool for this job.
> >
> > The problem I am trying to solve is that a generic function that detects
> > reference count underflow that was passed to call_rcu(), and there are
> > a lot of places where the underlying problem might lie, and pretty much
> > no information.  One thing that could help is something that identifies
> > which use case the underflow corresponds to.
> >
> > So, is there something out there (including old patches) that, given a
> > pointer to allocated memory, gives some information about who allocated
> > it?  Or should I risk further inflaming the MM guys by creating one?  ;-)
> 
> Hi Paul,
> 
> KASAN can do this. However (1) it has non-trivial overhead on its own
> (but why would you want to debug something without KASAN anyway :))
> (2) there is no support for doing just stack collection without the
> rest of KASAN (they are integrated at the moment) (3) there is no
> public interface function that does what you want, though, it should
> be easy to add it. The code is around here:
> https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/mm/kasan/report.c#L111-L128
> 
> Since KASAN already bears all overheads of stack collection/storing I
> was thinking that lots of other debugging tools could indeed piggy
> back on that and print much more informative errors message when
> enabled with KASAN.
> 
> Since recently KASAN also memorizes up to 2 "other" stacks per
> objects. This is currently used to memorize call_rcu stacks, since
> they are frequently more useful than actual free stacks for
> rcu-managed objects.
> That mechanism could also memorize last refcount stacks, however I
> afraid that they will evict everything else, since we have only 2
> slots, and frequently there are lots of refcount operations.

I am guessing that KASAN's overhead make it a no-go in this case
(in production), but am checking.  But this might change if we can
reproduce in a more controlled setting.

Huh.  I bet that I could do something with the information accessed by
print_tracking() in the slub allocator.  This of course means that I am
betting that we could run with CONFIG_SLUB_DEBUG=y.  Thoughts?

							Thanx, Paul