The poisonning performed on pool_free() used to help a little bit with
use-after-free detection, but usually did more harm than good in that
it was never possible to perform post-mortem analysis on released
objects once poisonning was enabled on allocation. Now that there is
a dedicated DEBUG_POOL_INTEGRITY, let's get rid of this annoyance
which is not even documented in the management manual.
This new option, when set, will cause the callers of pool_alloc() and
pool_free() to be recorded into an extra area in the pool that is expected
to be helpful for later inspection (e.g. in core dumps). For example it
may help figure that an object was released to a pool with some sub-fields
not yet released or that a use-after-free happened after releasing it,
with an immediate indication about the exact line of code that released
it (possibly an error path).
This only works with the per-thread cache, and even objects refilled from
the shared pool directly into the thread-local cache will have a NULL
there. That's not an issue since these objects have not yet been freed.
It's worth noting that pool_alloc_nocache() continues not to set any
caller pointer (e.g. when the cache is empty) because that would require
a possibly undesirable API change.
The extra cost is minimal (one pointer per object) and this completes
well with DEBUG_POOL_INTEGRITY.
When enabled, objects picked from the cache are checked for corruption
by comparing their contents against a pattern that was placed when they
were inserted into the cache. Objects are also allocated in the reverse
order, from the oldest one to the most recent, so as to maximize the
ability to detect such a corruption. The goal is to detect writes after
free (or possibly hardware memory corruptions). Contrary to DEBUG_UAF
this cannot detect reads after free, but may possibly detect later
corruptions and will not consume extra memory. The CPU usage will
increase a bit due to the cost of filling/checking the area and for the
preference for cold cache instead of hot cache, though not as much as
with DEBUG_UAF. This option is meant to be usable in production.
The purpose here is to explain how memory pools work, what their
architecture is depending on the build options (4 possible combinations),
and how the various build options affect their behavior.
Two pool-specific macros that were previously documented in initcalls
were moved to pools.txt.
