linux-kernel - Re: kmemleak reports in kernel 3.9.5+

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Date:	Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:45:38 -0700
From:	Ben Greear <greearb@...delatech.com>
To:	Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@....com>
CC:	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	netdev <netdev@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: kmemleak reports in kernel 3.9.5+

On 06/13/2013 08:50 AM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 01:28:13AM +0100, Ben Greear wrote:
>> On 06/11/2013 12:52 PM, Ben Greear wrote:
>>> On 06/10/2013 03:32 PM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
>>>> On 10 June 2013 19:22, Ben Greear <greearb@...delatech.com> wrote:
>>>>> We had a system go OOM while doing lots of wireless
>>>>> stations.  (System had 8GB of RAM, so I suspect a leak).
>>>>>
>>>>> I enabled kmemleak in a 3.9.5 (plus some local patches) and
>>>>> I see the entries below.  Any idea if these are real or not?
>>
>> Most of this went away when I disabled SLUB debugging and other
>> kernel hacking options.  The wifi cfg80211_inform_bss_frame
>> remains, however.  I'll go dig some more on that tomorrow...didn't
>> see anything obvious at first glance.
>>
>> But, perhaps there could be some improvements to
>> kmemleak to make it deal better with the various kernel
>> debugging features?
>
> That's unrelated to the debugging features. Kmemleak cannot find
> pointers to the allocated objects. They could be real leaks or it simply
> doesn't scan the right memory where such pointers are stored. The debug
> objects are stored in a list with the head as static memory, so it
> should be scanned.

I re-ran a similar test just now, but I had added an explicit reference
for each of the items that I know this test causes to leak (I add them
to a global list.)

This means that memleak would no longer show them as leaked, and that
also cleaned up all of the strange leaks reported before.

So, I think kmemleak is at least mostly working properly, even with lots
of debugging options.

Thanks,
Ben

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb@...delatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com

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