Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:04:39 -0500 | | From | Rik van Riel <> | | Subject | Re: tracking memory usage/leak in "inactive" field in /proc/meminfo? |
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On 02/11/2010 01:54 PM, Chris Friesen wrote: > On 02/10/2010 06:45 PM, Minchan Kim wrote: >> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 2:05 AM, Chris Friesen<cfriesen@nortel.com> wrote: > >>> In those spreadsheets I notice that >>> memfree+active+inactive+slab+pagetables is basically a constant. >>> However, if I don't use active+inactive then I can't make the numbers >>> add up. And the difference between active+inactive and >>> buffers+cached+anonpages+dirty+mapped+pagetables+vmallocused grows >>> almost monotonically. >> >> Such comparison is not right. That's because code pages of program account >> with cached and mapped but they account just one in lru list(active + >> inactive). >> Also, if you use mmap on any file, above is applied. > > That just makes the comparison even worse...it means that there is more > memory in active/inactive that isn't accounted for in any other category > in /proc/meminfo.
Which does not happen in the standard 2.6.27 kernel.
Are you leaking memory in your driver?
> >> I can't find any clue with your attachment. >> You said you used kernel with some modification and non-vanilla drivers. >> So I suspect that. Maybe kernel memory leak? > > Possibly. Or it could be a use case issue, I know there have been > memory leaks fixed since 2.6.27. :) > >> Now kernel don't account kernel memory allocations except SLAB. > > I don't think that's entirely accurate. I think cached, buffers, > pagetables, vmallocUsed are all kernel allocations. Granted, they're > generally on behalf of userspace. > > I've discovered that the generic page allocator (alloc_page, etc.) is > not tracked at all in /proc/meminfo. I seem to see the memory increase > in the page cache (that is, active/inactive), so that would seem to rule > out most direct allocations. > >> I think this patch can help you find the kernel memory leak. >> (It isn't merged with mainline by somewhy but it is useful to you :) >> >> http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=123782029809850&w=2 > > I have a modified version of that which I picked up as part of the > kmemleak backport. However, it doesn't help unless I can narrow down > *which* pages I should care about. > > I tried using kmemleak directly, but it didn't find anything. I've also > tried checking for inactive pages which haven't been written to in 10 > minutes, and haven't had much luck there either. But active/inactive > keeps growing, and I don't know why. > > Chris
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