From: Steven Rostedt Impact: prevent possible memory leak The reader page of the ring buffer is special. Although it points into the ring buffer, it is not part of the actual buffer. It is a page used by the reader to swap with a page in the ring buffer. Once the swap is made, the new reader page is again outside the buffer. Even though the reader page points into the buffer, it is really pointing to residual data. Note, this data is used by the reader. reader page | v (prev) +---+ (next) +----------| |----------+ | +---+ | v v +---+ +---+ +---+ -->| |------->| |------->| |---> <--| |<-------| |<-------| |<--- +---+ +---+ +---+ ^ ^ ^ \ | / ------- Buffer--------- If we perform a list_del_init() on the reader page we will actually remove the last page the reader swapped with and not the reader page itself. This will cause that page to not be freed, and thus is a memory leak. Luckily, the only user of the ring buffer so far is ftrace. And ftrace will not free its ring buffer after it allocates it. There is no current possible memory leak. But once there are other users, or if ftrace dynamically creates and frees its ring buffer, then this would be a memory leak. This patch fixes the leak for future cases. Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt --- kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c | 1 - 1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-) diff --git a/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c b/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c index edce2ff..960cbf4 100644 --- a/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c +++ b/kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c @@ -563,7 +563,6 @@ static void rb_free_cpu_buffer(struct ring_buffer_per_cpu *cpu_buffer) struct list_head *head = &cpu_buffer->pages; struct buffer_page *bpage, *tmp; - list_del_init(&cpu_buffer->reader_page->list); free_buffer_page(cpu_buffer->reader_page); list_for_each_entry_safe(bpage, tmp, head, list) { -- 1.6.2.1 -- -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/