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

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Date:	Fri, 12 Feb 2010 11:38:12 +0900
From:	Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@...il.com>
To:	Chris Friesen <cfriesen@...tel.com>
Cc:	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?

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 3:54 AM, Chris Friesen <cfriesen@...tel.com> wrote:
> That just makes the comparison even worse...it means that there is more
> memory in active/inactive that isn't accounted for in any other category
> in /proc/meminfo.

Hmm. It's very strange. It's impossible if your kernel and drivers is normal.
Could you grep sources who increases NR_ACTIVE/INACTIVE?
I doubt one of your driver does increase and miss decrease.

>> Now kernel don't account kernel memory allocations except SLAB.
>
> I don't think that's entirely accurate.  I think cached, buffers,
> pagetables, vmallocUsed are all kernel allocations.  Granted, they're
> generally on behalf of userspace.

Yes. I just said simple. What I means kernel doesn't account whole memory
usage. :)

> 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.


> I tried using kmemleak directly, but it didn't find anything.  I've also
> tried checking for inactive pages which haven't been written to in 10
> minutes, and haven't had much luck there either.  But active/inactive
> keeps growing, and I don't know why.

If leak cause by alloc_page or __get_free_pages, kmemleak can't find leak.

>
> Chris
>



-- 
Kind regards,
Minchan Kim
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