On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 09:56:49AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > The ironic thing is that I asked Dan to add the feature to smatch > because I found two such bugs in ext4, and I suspected there would be > more. Sure enough, it found four more such bugs, including two in a > recent commit where I had found the first two bugs --- and I had > missed the other two even though I was specifically looking for such > instances. Oops. :-) > > Maybe we can add a debugging config option? I think having static > checkers plus some kmalloc failure testing should be sufficient to > prevent these sorts of problem from showing up. > > It would seem to me that this is the sort of thing that a static > checker should find reliably; Coverity has found things that were more > complex than what this should require, I think. I don't know if they > would be willing to add something this kernel-specific, though. (I've > added Dave Jones to the thread since he's been working a lot with > Coverity; Dave, what do you think?) It *might* be possible to rig up something using their modelling functionality, but I've not managed to make that work to my ends in the past. I suspect a runtime check would be more fruitful faster than they could implement kernel specific checkers & roll them out. Dave -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>