man/man9/memguard.9

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.Dd October 21, 2011
.Dt MEMGUARD 9
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm MemGuard
.Nd "memory allocator for debugging purposes"
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Cd "options DEBUG_MEMGUARD"
.Sh DESCRIPTION
.Nm
is a simple and small replacement memory allocator designed
to help detect tamper-after-free scenarios.
These problems are more and more common and likely with
multithreaded kernels where race conditions are more prevalent.
.Pp
.Nm
can take over
.Fn malloc ,
.Fn realloc
and
.Fn free
for a single malloc type.
Alternatively
.Nm
can take over
.Fn uma_zalloc ,
.Fn uma_zalloc_arg
and
.Fn uma_free
for a single
.Xr uma
zone.
Also
.Nm
can guard all allocations larger than
.Dv PAGE_SIZE ,
and can guard a random fraction of all allocations.
There is also a knob to prevent allocations smaller than a specified
size from being guarded, to limit memory waste.
.Sh EXAMPLES
To use
.Nm
for a memory type, either add an entry to
.Pa /boot/loader.conf :
.Bd -literal -offset indent
vm.memguard.desc=<memory_type>
.Ed
.Pp
Or set the
.Va vm.memguard.desc
.Xr sysctl 8
variable at run-time:
.Bd -literal -offset indent
sysctl vm.memguard.desc=<memory_type>
.Ed
.Pp
Where
.Ar memory_type
can be either a short description of the memory type to monitor,
either name of
.Xr uma 9
zone.
Only allocations from that
.Ar memory_type
made after
.Va vm.memguard.desc
is set will potentially be guarded.
If
.Va vm.memguard.desc
is modified at run-time then only allocations of the new
.Ar memory_type
will potentially be guarded once the
.Xr sysctl 8
is set.
Existing guarded allocations will still be properly released by
either
.Xr free 9
or
.Xr uma_zfree 9 ,
depending on what kind of allocation was taken over.
.Pp
To determine short description of a
.Xr malloc 9
type one can either take it from the first column of
.Xr vmstat 8 Fl m
output, or to find it in the kernel source.
It is the second argument to
.Xr MALLOC_DEFINE 9
macro.
To determine name of
.Xr uma 9
zone one can either take it from the first column of
.Xr vmstat 8 Fl z
output, or to find it in the kernel source.
It is the first argument to the
.Xr uma_zcreate 9
function.
.Pp
The
.Va vm.memguard.divisor
boot-time tunable is used to scale how much of the system's physical
memory
.Nm
is allowed to consume.
The default is 10, so up to
.Va cnt.v_page_count Ns /10
pages can be used.
.Nm
will reserve
.Va vm_kmem_max
/
.Va vm.memguard.divisor
bytes of virtual address space, limited by twice the physical memory
size.
The physical limit is reported as
.Va vm.memguard.phys_limit
and the virtual space reserved for
.Nm
is reported as
.Va vm.memguard.mapsize .
.Pp
.Nm
will not do page promotions for any allocation smaller than
.Va vm.memguard.minsize
bytes.
The default is 0, meaning all allocations can potentially be guarded.
.Nm
can guard sufficiently large allocations randomly, with average
frequency of every one in 100000 /
.Va vm.memguard.frequency
allocations.
The default is 0, meaning no allocations are randomly guarded.
.Pp
.Nm
can optionally add unmapped guard pages around each allocation to
detect overflow and underflow, if
.Va vm.memguard.options
has the 1 bit set.
This option is enabled by default.
.Nm
will optionally guard all allocations of
.Dv PAGE_SIZE
or larger if
.Va vm.memguard.options
has the 2 bit set.
This option is off by default.
By default
.Nm
doesn't guard those
.Xr uma 9
zones that have been initialized with the
.Dv UMA_ZONE_NOFREE
flag set, since it can produce false positives on them.
However, this safety measure can be turned off by setting bit 3
of the
.Va vm.memguard.options
tunable.
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr sysctl 8 ,
.Xr vmstat 8 ,
.Xr contigmalloc 9 ,
.Xr malloc 9 ,
.Xr redzone 9 ,
.Xr uma 9
.Sh HISTORY
.Nm
first appeared in
.Fx 6.0 .
.Sh AUTHORS
.An -nosplit
.Nm
was originally written by
.An Bosko Milekic Aq bmilekic@FreeBSD.org .
This manual page was originally written by
.An Christian Brueffer Aq brueffer@FreeBSD.org .
Additions have been made by
.An Matthew Fleming Aq mdf@FreeBSD.org
and
.An Gleb Smirnoff Aq glebius@FreeBSD.org
to both the implementation and the documentation.
.Sh BUGS
It is not possible to guard allocations that really expect themselves to be
allocated from
.Xr uma 9 ,
utilizing additional interfaces apart from
.Fn uma_zalloc
and
.Fn uma_free ,
for example
.Fn uma_find_refcnt .
For the moment of writing only
.Xr mbuf 9
cluster zones belong to that kind of allocations.
Attempt to guard them would lead to kernel panic.