Debugging With kmemcheck

“‘With a lot of help from Ingo Molnar and Pekka Enberg over the
last couple of weeks, we’ve been able to produce a new version of
kmemcheck!’ announced Vegard Nossum, adding, ‘the current version
of the patch boots on real hardware, but we’ve seen freezes on some
machines, so it’s not perfect yet. (In other words, this patch is
HIGHLY experimental, and run at your own risk, etc.).’ He also
offered a high level summary of the patch:

“‘kmemcheck is a patch to the linux kernel that detects use of
uninitialized memory. It does this by trapping every read and write
to memory that was allocated dynamically (e.g. using kmalloc()). If
a memory address is read that has not previously been written to, a
message is printed to the kernel log…'”

Complete
Story