[PATCH RFC 09/10] kfence, Documentation: add KFENCE documentation

[Dave Hansen]

On 9/7/20 6:40 AM, Marco Elver wrote:
> +The most important parameter is KFENCE's sample interval, which can be set via
> +the kernel boot parameter ``kfence.sample_interval`` in milliseconds. The
> +sample interval determines the frequency with which heap allocations will be
> +guarded by KFENCE. The default is configurable via the Kconfig option
> +``CONFIG_KFENCE_SAMPLE_INTERVAL``. Setting ``kfence.sample_interval=0``
> +disables KFENCE.
> +
> +With the Kconfig option ``CONFIG_KFENCE_NUM_OBJECTS`` (default 255), the number
> +of available guarded objects can be controlled. Each object requires 2 pages,
> +one for the object itself and the other one used as a guard page; object pages
> +are interleaved with guard pages, and every object page is therefore surrounded
> +by two guard pages.

Is it hard to make these both tunable at runtime?

It would be nice if I hit a KFENCE error on a system to bump up the
number of objects and turn up the frequency of guarded objects to try to
hit it again.  That would be a really nice feature for development
environments.

It would also be nice to have a counter somewhere (/proc/vmstat?) to
explicitly say how many pages are currently being used.

I didn't mention it elsewhere, but this work looks really nice.  It has
very little impact on the core kernel and looks like a very nice tool to
have in the toolbox.  I don't see any major reasons we wouldn't want to
merge after our typical bikeshedding. :)