Re: oom-killer killing even if memory is available?

[Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 02:02:55PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:27:00 +0000 Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie> wrote:
> 
> > > 
> > > Something must have allocated (and possibly leaked) it.
> > > 
> > 
> > This looks like a memory leak all right. There used to be a patch that
> > recorded a stack trace for every page allocation but it was dropped from
> > -mm ages ago because of a merge conflict. I didn't revive it at the time
> > because it wasn't of immediate concern.
> > 
> > Should I revive the patch or do we have preferred ways of tracking down
> > memory leaks these days?
> 
> We know that a dentry is getting leaked but afaik we don't know which one
> or why.
> 
> We could get more info via the page-owner-tracking-leak-detector.patch
> approach, or by dumping the info in the cached dentries - I think Wu
> Fengguang prepared a patch which does that.
> 

Looks like it

> I'm not sure why I dropped page-owner-tracking-leak-detector.patch actually
> - it was pretty useful sometimes and afaik we still haven't merged any tool
> which duplicates it.
> 

The note I got at the time was "This patch was dropped because procfs
changes broke it".

> Here's the latest version which I have:
> 

That matches what I have. I'll check and see can I figure out what broke
with it.

> From: Alexander Nyberg <alexn@dsv.su.se>
> 
> Introduces CONFIG_PAGE_OWNER that keeps track of the call chain under which a
> page was allocated.  Includes a user-space helper in
> Documentation/page_owner.c to sort the enormous amount of output that this may
> give (thanks tridge).
> 
> <SNIP>

-- 
Mel Gorman
Part-time Phd Student                          Linux Technology Center
University of Limerick                         IBM Dublin Software Lab

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