mm/mm_init: Introduce a boot parameter for check_pages

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Use-after-free and double-free bugs can be very difficult to track down.
The kernel is good at tracking these and preventing bad pages from being
used/created through simple checks gated behind "check_pages_enabled".

Currently, the only ways to enable this flag is by building with
CONFIG_DEBUG_VM, or as a side effect of other checks such as
init_on_{alloc, free}, page_poisoning, or debug_pagealloc among others.
These solutions are powerful, but may often be too coarse in balancing
the performance vs. safety that a user may want, particularly in
latency-sensitive production environments.

Introduce a new boot parameter "check_pages", which enables page checking
with no other side effects. It takes kstrbool-able inputs as an argument
(i.e. 0/1, true/false, on/off, ...). This patch is backwards-compatible;
setting CONFIG_DEBUG_VM still enables page checking.

Acked-by: SeongJae Park <sj@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Anshuman Khandual <anshuman.khandual@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Joshua Hahn <joshua.hahnjy@gmail.com>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20251201180739.2330474-1-joshua.hahnjy@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: Mike Rapoport (Microsoft) <rppt@kernel.org>

...

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Joshua Hahn 2025-12-01 10:07:38 -08:00 • committed by Mike Rapoport (Microsoft)

parent ac3fd01e4c

commit 83c8f7b5e1

2 changed files with 17 additions and 1 deletions

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8

Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt

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10

mm/mm_init.c

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