Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 20 May 2008 08:12:41 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Make |
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On Tue, 20 May 2008, Alexey Dobriyan wrote: > > Why list_head corruptions are special?
It's not that list corruptions are special, but: - *any* corruption is very interesting, and the earlier we find it the better - we have a lot of lists in the kernel, so testing pointers is actually likely to find stuff. - and lists are something we can *test* for corruption
That third one is important. Most random pointers we can't sanely test because they don't have trivial and important patterns.
The second one is relevant too: some of the pointers that we *could* test (struct task has a pointer to the thread struct and back, and we could test that) are just not common enough to be worth testing. And other concepts don't have any nice centralized routines for adding the test.
So no, lists aren't "special" in any inherent way, they are just special in these kinds of "incidentally, a lot of random data structure corruption has traditionally shown up in lists, because there are so many of them".
Linus
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