Re: memory leak in inotify_update_watch

[Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>]

On Wed, Jul 08, 2020 at 09:17:37AM +0200, Dmitry Vyukov wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 8:17 PM Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com> wrote:
> > Kmemleak never performs well under heavy load. Normally you'd need to
> > let the system settle for a bit before checking whether the leaks are
> > still reported. The issue is caused by the memory scanning not stopping
> > the whole machine, so pointers may be hidden in registers on different
> > CPUs (list insertion/deletion for example causes transient kmemleak
> > confusion).
> >
> > I think the syzkaller guys tried a year or so ago to run it in parallel
> > with kmemleak and gave up shortly. The proposal was to add a "stopscan"
> > command to kmemleak which would do this under stop_machine(). However,
> > no-one got to implementing it.
> >
> > So, in this case, does the leak still appear with the reproducer, once
> > the system went idle?
> 
> This report came from syzbot, so obviously we did not give up :)

That's good to know ;).

> We don't run scanning in parallel with fuzzing and do a very intricate
> multi-step dance to overcome false positives:
> https://github.com/google/syzkaller/blob/5962a2dc88f6511b77100acdf687c1088f253f6b/executor/common_linux.h#L3407-L3478
> and only report leaks that are reproducible.
> So far I have not seen any noticable amount of false positives, and
> you can see 70 already fixed leaks here:
> https://syzkaller.appspot.com/upstream/fixed?manager=ci-upstream-gce-leak
> https://syzkaller.appspot.com/upstream?manager=ci-upstream-gce-leak

Thanks for the information and the good work here. If you have time, you
could implement the stop_machine() kmemleak scan as well ;).

-- 
Catalin