Re: Memory leak in ip_dst_cache

[Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>]

Le dimanche 11 septembre 2011 à 23:07 -0700, Kumar S a écrit :
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
> To: Kumar S <ps2kumar@yahoo.com>
> Cc: Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com>; netdev <netdev@vger.kernel.org>
> Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2011 10:40 PM
> Subject: Re: Memory leak in ip_dst_cache
> 
> Le dimanche 11 septembre 2011 à 20:38 -0700, Kumar S a écrit :
> 
> Please dont top post.
> 
> >> Thanks Neil. I did try with prink(). I do see entries getting aged
> >> out, but they are not getting deallocated. This seems to be happening
> >> because of "ref_cnt". When the route entries are added the ref_cnt is
> >> set to 1. Looks this is causing trouble clearing the entries
> >> completely. If I set the ref_cnt to 0, I can see it working. Now I'm
> >> trying to understand whether this is right. Please let me know if you
> >> have any thoughts on it.
> 
> >I believe I already explained what was happening.
> 
> >A tcp socket has a pointer to a dst, so it holds a reference on it, to
> >make sure no freeing of dst can happen while at least some socket still
> >can reference dst. (It could reference freed memory and crash)
> 
> >As soon as the tcp socket will try to transmit some data, the dst will
> >be checked and we notice its obsolete : We then release the refcount and
> >dst pointer.
> 
> >Later, the garbage collector can notice dst refcount is zero and can
> >free dst.
> 
> >If you have dormant tcp sockets (no trafic at all), they hold their dst.
> >A dormant tcp socket has a pretty more expensive memory cost than its
> >dst. (Socket structure, dentry, inode, and probably in user land a
> >thread or process, and data)
>  
> Thanks Eric for detailed explanation. You did mention this before.
> What I see is the cache entries related to the TCP sockets are getting
> cleared, whenever they age out. But the issue we see here is with the
> broadcast messages such as SMB messages and network neighbor hood
> messages. They never get freed. There is no traffic to those
> destinations from our board. 

What do you mean ? Your box is a router only ?

Those SMB messages are going through it ?