Memory leak with dev_add_pack()

[anish kumar]

> Hi!
>
> On 21:22 Sun 23 Jan     , anish kumar wrote:
>> > The funny point is that buffer_head belongs to the filesystem 
>> > subsystem.
>> > What
>> > file systems are you using? Could it be that your code just triggers 
>> > the
>> > memory leak, because data is logged to disk, e.g. to /var/log/kern.log 
>> > ?
>> I did small experiment with your code.I removed all your logs which were
>> getting
>> logged in kernel buffers(kern.log).With this change i checked the 
>> "meminfo"
>> and found that
>> the memory leaking is almost same as compared to normal case(with no 
>> change
>> in your code).
>>
>> >
>> > I have tried your program on my virtual machine (2.6.28) and could see 
>> > any
>> > leak, but maybe data is leaked very slowly...
>> i confirm that data is leaking very slowly (below is the output i got on 
>> my
>> ubuntu machine
>> with removed logs from your code).
>>
>> $date
>> Sun Jan 23 19:13:47 RET 2011
>>
>> $ head -n5 /proc/meminfo
>> MemTotal:        1018172 kB
>> MemFree:          373708 kB
>> Buffers:           32232 kB
>> Cached:           296004 kB
>> SwapCached:            0 kB
>>
>> $ date
>> Sun Jan 23 19:15:03 RET 2011
>>
>> $ head -n5 /proc/meminfo
>> MemTotal:        1018172 kB
>> MemFree:          373584 kB
>> Buffers:           32248 kB
>> Cached:           296004 kB
>> SwapCached:            0 kB
>>
>> With logs enabled in your code i can see marginal increase in leaking
>> memory.
>
> This small increase could easily be caused by background activity. Please 
> try
> to reproduce this in single user mode with all file systems mounted 
> read-only
> (use e.g. "mount -o remount,ro /") and no processes running except init 
> and
> your shell. Then see if memory increase is both correlated to network 
> traffic
> and reason of system crashes. If it takes too long, you can add e.g.
> "mem=32M" to the kernel boot parameter list in the bootloader.
Thanks for this suggestions.

After persuading my kernel to use only 100M(with 32M system not booting,it 
is not vanilla kernel)
of my physical memory and after installing your ko i tried to check meminfo 
and found
that the claim made by you(.ko is leaking memory) may not be true as i can 
see in the
output of /proc/meminfo,MemFree is sometimes increasing and sometimes 
decreasing(could
be because of several other components).
I can say with certainty that your ko looks fine to me after this testing.
I couldn't see any panic happening in my system( system is running fine 
under such low memory).
However i see that several other applications(xserv) is crashing because of 
out of memory which i think is fine.

ps:I dont have vanilla kernel where i could have changed the intitialisation 
files to remount while booting and could have
controlled the list of process running on the system.
In android we are doing that in init.rc file need to check in ubuntu.

> -Michi
> -- 
> programing a layer 3+4 network protocol for mesh networks
> see http://michaelblizek.twilightparadox.com
>