[PATCH] arm: mm: Poison freed init memory

Russell King - ARM Linux linux at arm.linux.org.uk
Wed Jan 5 15:26:45 EST 2011


On Wed, Jan 05, 2011 at 11:47:25AM -0800, Stephen Boyd wrote:
> Poisoning __init marked memory can be useful when tracking down
> obscure memory corruption bugs. When a pointer is 0xCCCCCCCC in an

That's a bad idea for a value.  With a 3GB page offset and 256MB or
more memory, accesses to such an address will always succeed.

There's two things to be considered when selecting a possible poison
value:

1. what value is guaranteed to provoke an undefined instruction exception?
2. what value when used as an address and dereferenced is mostly always
   going to abort?

1 for ARM mode implies an 0xe7fXXXfX value.  For Thumb mode 0xdeXX.  We
use this space for breakpoints.

2 unfortunately depends on the platform. 



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