On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 12:23:58AM +0200, Quentin wrote:
> 
> Of course. However since I unmounted and remounted /home the 'buffer' line
> is now only 59megs, and they are still not dropped when a program tries to
> malloc all the memory. I'll tell next time the problem shows up (it
> can take ten days)
> 

Are you willing to patch and recompile your kernel?  If so, the
following patch would be very helpful in determining what is going on.
It allows us to see what buffer heads are in use for a particular
block device.  Attached please the kernel patch and the user program.

      	       		       	   	  	- Ted

P.S.  Unfortunately, all of the code to debug buffer head leaks was
dropped when the buffer cache was moved into the page cache.  Any
comments about a refined version of patch getting merged into the
mainline kernel as a debugging measure?