Re: Gigantic memory leak in linux-2.6.[789]!

[Kasper Sandberg]

On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 16:13 +0200, Kristian Sørensen wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> After some more testing after the previous post of the OOPS in 
> generic_delete_inode, we have now found a gigantic memory leak in Linux 2.6.
> [789]. The scenario is the same:
> 
> File system: EXT3
> Unpack and delete linux-2.6.8.1.tar.bz2 with this Bash while loop:
> 
> let "i = 0"
> while [ "$i" -lt 10 ]; do
>    tar jxf linux-2.6.8.1.tar.bz2;
>    rm -fr linux-2.6.8.1;
>    let "i = i + 1"
> done
> 
> When the loop has completed, the system use 124 MB memory more _each_ time.... 
> so it is pretty easy to make a denial-of-service attack :-(
well.. i could understand if it used the total size of a unpacked linux
kernel, even after the loop stopped, since it would just keep it cached,
however, it might not be that case when it adds 124mb each time...
> 
> We have tried the same test on a RHEL WS 3 host (running a RedHat 2.4 kernel) 
> - and there is no problem.
> 
> 
> Any deas?
> 

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