Re: memleaks, acpi + ext4 + tty

Theodore Tso
2009-08-30T18:24:35Z

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 10:29:01AM -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
> > Yes, as soon as the next merge window opens.  The leak only shows up
> > when you mount and unmount a filesystem, which under normal
> > circumstances doesn't happen a huge number of times on most systems.
> > By the time it showed up it was late enough in the 2.6.31-rcX series
> > that I figured it was better to wait until the next merge window.  I
> > didn't consider it a high priority bug.
>
> That's odd I run into this kmemleak with a single bootup, no manual remounts.
>

Yeah, but it's a singleton leak. Let me be a bit more precise this
time: the leak happens at mount time because we're essentially doing
this due to some code that was accidentally duplicated when it was
being refactored:

a = kmalloc(sizeof(...)*N, GFP_ATOMIC);
...
a = kmalloc(sizeof(...)*N, GFP_ATOMIC);

So a small amount of memory is leaked each time a filesystem is
mounted. It doesn't become a huge problem unless you are repeatedly
mounting and unmounting the same filesystem in a tight loop.

- Ted