Re: kmemleak suggestion (long message)

From: Catalin Marinas
Date: Fri Jun 26 2009 - 04:26:26 EST


On Fri, 2009-06-26 at 08:59 +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Currently kmemleak prints info about all objects. I guess
> > sometimes kmemleak gives you more than you actually need.
>
> It prints _a lot_ of info and spams the syslog. I lost crash info a
> few days ago due to that: by the time i inspected a crashed machine
> the tons of kmemleak output scrolled out the crash from the dmesg
> buffer.
>
> This is not acceptable.
>
> Instead it should perhaps print _at most_ a single line every few
> minutes, printing a summary about _how many_ leaked entries it
> suspects, and should offer a /debug/mm/kmemleak style of file where
> the entries can be read out from.

I agree as well. It already provides the /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
which triggers a scan and shows possible leaks. That's easily fixable.

BTW, this was questioned in the past as well - do we still need the
automatic scanning from a kernel thread? Can a user cron job just read
the kmemleak file?

--
Catalin

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