Re: 2.6.39-rc4+: Kernel leaking memory during FS scanning, regression?

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Mon Apr 25 2011 - 13:19:12 EST


On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 10:00 AM, Bruno Prémont
<bonbons@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I hope tiny-rcu is not that broken... as it would mean driving any
> PREEMPT_NONE or PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY system out of memory when compiling
> packages (and probably also just unpacking larger tarballs or running
> things like du).

I'm sure that TINYRCU can be fixed if it really is the problem.

So I just want to make sure that we know what the root cause of your
problem is. It's quite possible that it _is_ a real leak of filp or
something, but before possibly wasting time trying to figure that out,
let's see if your config is to blame.

> And with system doing nothing (except monitoring itself) memory usage
> goes increasing all the time until it starves (well it seems to keep
> ~20M free, pushing processes it can to swap). Config is just being
> make oldconfig from working 2.6.38 kernel (answering default for new
> options)

How sure are you that the system really is idle? Quite frankly, the
constant growing doesn't really look idle to me.

> Attached graph matching numbers of previous mail. (dropping caches was at
> 17:55, system idle since then)

Nothing at all going on in 'ps' during that time? And what does
slabinfo say at that point now that kmemleak isn't dominating
everything else?

Linus
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