Detecting kernel memory leaks

Posted Jun 29, 2009 7:40 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Detecting kernel memory leaks by dlang
Parent article: Detecting kernel memory leaks

if a garbage collector is looking at random bytes and trying to guess if they are pointers or not it's going to guess wrong a lot of the time.

Exactly. Which is why C is not an ideal language for a garbage-collection runtime. More high-level languages provide guarantees of what's a pointer and what isn't, so the GC doesn't have to guess.

Garbage collection in C and C++ can still be useful and fast, but it can never be 100% correct. This may not matter for many applications, but for programs like the kernel which need to be highly secure and must cope with untrusted user input (which could easily contain 32-bit or 64-bit ints carefully chosen to look like pointers), I suspect it does.

I wonder if there is a subset of C which provides the minimal guarantees needed to make garbage collection safe and complete. The main thing would be not to cast pointers to ints and back, nor to allow casting between pointers to things of different sizes, nor arbitrary pointer arithmetic (though arrays could still be provided).