Re: kmemleak fails to report detected leaks after allocationfailure

From: Catalin Marinas
Date: Wed Jul 20 2011 - 04:30:48 EST


On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 10:14:38PM +0100, Nick Bowler wrote:
> I just ran into a somewhat amusing issue with kmemleak. After running
> for a while (10 days), and detecting about 100 "suspected memory leaks",
> kmemleak ultimately reported:
>
> kmemleak: Cannot allocate a kmemleak_object structure
> kmemleak: Automatic memory scanning thread ended
> kmemleak: Kernel memory leak detector disabled
>
> OK, so something failed and kmemleak apparently can't recover from
> this. However, at this point, it appears that kmemleak has *also*
> lost the ability to report the earlier leaks that it actually
> detected.
>
> cat: /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak: Device or resource busy
>
> It seems to me that kmemleak shouldn't lose the ability to report leaks
> that it already detected after it disables itself due to an issue that
> was potentially caused by the very leaks that it managed to detect
> (unlikely in this instance, but still...).

Very good point, I haven't thought of this. I'll try to improve this
part.

Thanks.

--
Catalin
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