kmemleak: add clear command support

In an ideal world your kmemleak output will be small, when its
not (usually during initial bootup) you can use the clear command
to ingore previously reported and unreferenced kmemleak objects. We
do this by painting all currently reported unreferenced objects grey.
We paint them grey instead of black to allow future scans on the same
objects as such objects could still potentially reference newly
allocated objects in the future.

To test a critical section on demand with a clean
/sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak you can do:

echo clear > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
        test your kernel or modules
echo scan > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak

Then as usual to get your report with:

cat /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak

Signed-off-by: Luis R. Rodriguez <lrodriguez@atheros.com>
Signed-off-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>

1 files changed, 30 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/kmemleak.txt b/Documentation/kmemleak.txt
index c223785339b5..34f6638aa5ac 100644
--- a/Documentation/kmemleak.txt
+++ b/Documentation/kmemleak.txt
@@ -27,6 +27,13 @@ To trigger an intermediate memory scan:
 
   # echo scan > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
 
+To clear the list of all current possible memory leaks:
+
+  # echo clear > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
+
+New leaks will then come up upon reading /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
+again.
+
 Note that the orphan objects are listed in the order they were allocated
 and one object at the beginning of the list may cause other subsequent
 objects to be reported as orphan.
@@ -42,6 +49,8 @@ Memory scanning parameters can be modified at run-time by writing to the
   scan=<secs>	- set the automatic memory scanning period in seconds
 		  (default 600, 0 to stop the automatic scanning)
   scan		- trigger a memory scan
+  clear		- clear list of current memory leak suspects, done by
+		  marking all current reported unreferenced objects grey
   dump=<addr>	- dump information about the object found at <addr>
 
 Kmemleak can also be disabled at boot-time by passing "kmemleak=off" on
@@ -87,6 +96,27 @@ avoid this, kmemleak can also store the number of values pointing to an
 address inside the block address range that need to be found so that the
 block is not considered a leak. One example is __vmalloc().
 
+Testing specific sections with kmemleak
+---------------------------------------
+
+Upon initial bootup your /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak output page may be
+quite extensive. This can also be the case if you have very buggy code
+when doing development. To work around these situations you can use the
+'clear' command to clear all reported unreferenced objects from the
+/sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak output. By issuing a 'scan' after a 'clear'
+you can find new unreferenced objects; this should help with testing
+specific sections of code.
+
+To test a critical section on demand with a clean kmemleak do:
+
+  # echo clear > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
+  ... test your kernel or modules ...
+  # echo scan > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
+
+Then as usual to get your report with:
+
+  # cat /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
+
 Kmemleak API
 ------------