From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
To: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Cc: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>,
Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>,
Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>,
Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Make
Date: Tue, 20 May 2008 08:12:41 -0700 (PDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0805200806340.32253@woody.linux-foundation.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <b6fcc0a0805200800k10264445n59bb56d24b80cd2f@mail.gmail.com>
On Tue, 20 May 2008, Alexey Dobriyan wrote:
>
> Why list_head corruptions are special?
It's not that list corruptions are special, but:
- *any* corruption is very interesting, and the earlier we find it the
better
- we have a lot of lists in the kernel, so testing pointers is actually
likely to find stuff.
- and lists are something we can *test* for corruption
That third one is important. Most random pointers we can't sanely test
because they don't have trivial and important patterns.
The second one is relevant too: some of the pointers that we *could* test
(struct task has a pointer to the thread struct and back, and we could
test that) are just not common enough to be worth testing. And other
concepts don't have any nice centralized routines for adding the test.
So no, lists aren't "special" in any inherent way, they are just special
in these kinds of "incidentally, a lot of random data structure corruption
has traditionally shown up in lists, because there are so many of them".
Linus
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2008-05-20 15:14 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2008-05-02 18:27 [PATCH] Extend list debugging to cover hlists Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-01 20:32 ` Arjan van de Ven
2008-05-02 18:49 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-02 19:05 ` Dave Jones
2008-05-20 3:24 ` [PATCH] Make Dave Jones
2008-05-20 14:14 ` Arjan van de Ven
2008-05-20 14:27 ` Dave Jones
2008-05-20 14:54 ` Linus Torvalds
2008-05-20 15:20 ` Dave Jones
2008-05-20 16:15 ` Arjan van de Ven
2008-05-20 15:00 ` Alexey Dobriyan
2008-05-20 15:12 ` Linus Torvalds [this message]
2008-05-20 15:22 ` Dave Jones
2008-05-20 21:52 ` [PATCH] Make (LIST_DEBUG WARN not BUG) Alexey Dobriyan
2008-05-02 23:14 ` [PATCH] Extend list debugging to cover hlists Andrew Morton
2008-05-02 23:17 ` Matthew Wilcox
2008-05-02 23:39 ` Andrew Morton
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