Re: xenstored memory leak

[Wei Liu <wei.liu2@citrix.com>]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 02:20:28PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Wei Liu writes ("Re: [Xen-devel] xenstored memory leak"):
> > On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 02:21:38PM +0200, Juergen Gross wrote:
> > > qemu as the device model is setting up a xenstore watch for each backend
> > > type it is supporting. Unfortunately those watches are never removed
> > > again. This sums up to the observed memory leak.
> 
> I think this must be a bug in C xenstored.
> 
> > > I'm not sure how oxenstored is avoiding the problem, may be by testing
> > > socket connections to be still alive and so detecting qemu has gone.
> > > OTOH this won't help for oxenstored running in another domain than the
> > > device model (either due to oxenstore-stubdom, or a driver domain with
> > > a qemu based device model).
> > 
> > How unfortunate.
> > 
> > My gut feeling is that xenstored shouldn't have the knowledge to
> > associate a watch with a "process".
> 
> xenstored needs to associate watches with connections.  If a
> connection is terminated, the watches need to be cleaned up, along
> with whatever other things "belong" to that connection (notably
> transactions, and replies in flight).
> 
> Here a `connection' might be a socket, or a ring.
> 

Agreed.

> C xenstored does have code which tries to do this.  It's a bit
> impenetrable, though, because it's done through destructors provided
> to the reference counting membery allocator (!)
> 
> > The concept of a process is only meaningful to OS, which wouldn't
> > work on cross-domain xenstored setup.  Maybe the OS xenbus driver
> > should reap all watches on behalf the dead process. This would also
> > avoid a crashed QEMU leaking resources.
> 
> The OS xenbus driver needs to mediate everything, so that it can
> direct replies to the right places etc.  It needs to (and does)
> maintain a list of watches.  When a process closes the xenbus device,
> it destroys the watches by issuing commands to the actual xenstored
> via its ring connection.
> 
> I guess that the qemu in this case is making a socket connection to
> xenstored.
> 

Yeah, I suspect that as well.

Wei.

> Ian.

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