Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S266888AbUJWDpH (ORCPT ); Fri, 22 Oct 2004 23:45:07 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S267250AbUJVTki (ORCPT ); Fri, 22 Oct 2004 15:40:38 -0400 Received: from zcars04e.nortelnetworks.com ([47.129.242.56]:9725 "EHLO zcars04e.nortelnetworks.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S267164AbUJVTde (ORCPT ); Fri, 22 Oct 2004 15:33:34 -0400 Message-ID: <4179607A.8030204@nortelnetworks.com> Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 13:33:14 -0600 X-Sybari-Space: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 From: Chris Friesen User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Kristian_S=F8rensen?= CC: root@chaos.analogic.com, andre@tomt.net, Kasper Sandberg , LKML Mailinglist , umbrella@cs.aau.dk Subject: Re: Gigantic memory leak in linux-2.6.[789]! References: <200410221613.35913.ks@cs.aau.dk> <1098455535.12574.1.camel@localhost> <41792C36.4070301@users.sourceforge.net> <41795E69.9090909@cs.aau.dk> In-Reply-To: <41795E69.9090909@cs.aau.dk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1089 Lines: 27 Kristian S?rensen wrote: > Anyway - How does this work in practice? Does the file system > implementation use a wrapper for kfree or? When an app faults in new memory and there is no unused memory, the system will page out apps and/or filesystem data from the page cache so the memory can be given to the app requesting it. > Is there any way to force instant free of kernel memory - when freed? It's not free, it's in use by the page cache. This is a performance feature--we try and keep around as much stuff as possible that might be needed by running apps. > Else it is quite hard testing for possible memory leaks in our Umbrella > kernel module ... :-/ Such is life. As a crude workaround, on a swapless system you can start one or two memory hogs and they will force the system to free up as much memory as possible. Chris - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/