linux-kernel - Re: kmemleak suggestion (long message)

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Message-Id: <1246004740.30717.3.camel@pc1117.cambridge.arm.com>
Date:	Fri, 26 Jun 2009 09:25:40 +0100
From:	Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@....com>
To:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
Cc:	Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@...l.by>,
	Pekka Enberg <penberg@...helsinki.fi>,
	"Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org
Subject: Re: kmemleak suggestion (long message)

On Fri, 2009-06-26 at 08:59 +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@...l.by> 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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