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Google Engineer Proposes "Page Detective" As New Kernel Debugging Tool

Google software engineer Pasha Tatashin has proposed Page Detective as a new kernel debugging tool that is able to provide greater insight around the usage and mapping of physical memory pages.

The initial Page Detective code has been posted in "Request For Comments" form and makes use of the Linux DebugFS interface for providing insight around virtual and physical addresses. This tool is valuable for diagnosing memory-related issues such as checksum errors during live migration, filesystem journal failures, segmentation faults, and other forms of corruption." The output is presented via kernel log messages (can be accessed with dmesg), and includes information such as the page's reference count, mapping, flags, and memory cgroup.

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