linux-kernel - Re: tracking memory usage/leak in "inactive" field in /proc/meminfo?

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Message-ID: <tnxk4ui9wd4.fsf@pc1117.cambridge.arm.com>
Date:	Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:50:31 +0000
From:	Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@....com>
To:	Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@...il.com>
Cc:	Chris Friesen <cfriesen@...tel.com>,
	KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@...fujitsu.com>,
	Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	linux-mm@...ck.org, Balbir Singh <balbir@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: tracking memory usage/leak in "inactive" field in /proc/meminfo?

Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@...il.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 3:54 AM, Chris Friesen <cfriesen@...tel.com> wrote:
>> I have a modified version of that which I picked up as part of the
>> kmemleak backport.  However, it doesn't help unless I can narrow down
>> *which* pages I should care about.
>
> kmemleak doesn't support page allocator and ioremap.
> Above URL patch just can tell who requests page which is using(ie, not
> free) now.

The ioremap can be easily tracked by kmemleak (it is on my to-do list
but haven't managed to do it yet). That's not far from vmalloc.

The page allocator is a bit more difficult since it's used by the slab
allocator as well and it may lead to some recursive calls into
kmemleak. I'll have a think.

Anyway, you can leak memory without this being detected by kmemleak -
just add the allocated objects to a list and never remove them.

-- 
Catalin
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