kfence: add note to documentation about skipping covered allocations

Add a note briefly mentioning the new policy about "skipping currently
covered allocations if pool close to full." Since this has a notable
impact on KFENCE's bug-detection ability on systems with large uptimes,
it is worth pointing out the feature.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210923104803.2620285-5-elver@google.com
Signed-off-by: Marco Elver <elver@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com>
Acked-by: Alexander Potapenko <glider@google.com>
Cc: Aleksandr Nogikh <nogikh@google.com>
Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Cc: Taras Madan <tarasmadan@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

diff --git a/Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst b/Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst
index 0fbe330..d45f952 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst
+++ b/Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst
@@ -269,6 +269,17 @@ tail of KFENCE's freelist, so that the least recently freed objects are reused
 first, and the chances of detecting use-after-frees of recently freed objects
 is increased.
 
+If pool utilization reaches 75% (default) or above, to reduce the risk of the
+pool eventually being fully occupied by allocated objects yet ensure diverse
+coverage of allocations, KFENCE limits currently covered allocations of the
+same source from further filling up the pool. The "source" of an allocation is
+based on its partial allocation stack trace. A side-effect is that this also
+limits frequent long-lived allocations (e.g. pagecache) of the same source
+filling up the pool permanently, which is the most common risk for the pool
+becoming full and the sampled allocation rate dropping to zero. The threshold
+at which to start limiting currently covered allocations can be configured via
+the boot parameter ``kfence.skip_covered_thresh`` (pool usage%).
+
 Interface
 ---------