Ethernet bridge leaking memory

From: Kostja Siefen
Date: Thu Nov 10 2005 - 15:13:22 EST


Hi,

I have a strange problem with ethernet bridging in 2.6.13 which leads to heavy
slab allocation until memory is completely filled up.

My setup:

HP nx7000 Laptop running Kernel 2.6.13
- RTL 8139 network interface on board (module 8139too)
- PC Card Wired LAN Network Interface (module pcnet_cs)

After modprobing bridge and calling

brctl addbr br0
brctl addif br0 eth0 (RTL 8139)
brctl addif br0 eth2 (PC Card Wired LAN)

the bridge is up and running and works like a charm. Sending some traffic (1
MB/s is enough) through that bridge leads to massive kernel memory
allocation. slabtop reports, that "skbuff_head_cache" and "size-2048" eat up
all the memory (256 MB). This looks like a memory leak to me.

Even unloading the network modules does not free any memory, a reboot is
required.

Any ideas?

Yours,

Kostja

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