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Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 11:38:12 +0900
Message-ID: <28c262361002111838q7db763feh851a9bea4fdd9096@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: tracking memory usage/leak in "inactive" field in /proc/meminfo?
From: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com>
To: Chris Friesen <cfriesen@nortel.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>,
       Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       linux-mm@kvack.org, Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
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On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 3:54 AM, Chris Friesen <cfriesen@nortel.com> wrote:
> 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.

Hmm. It's very strange. It's impossible if your kernel and drivers is normal.
Could you grep sources who increases NR_ACTIVE/INACTIVE?
I doubt one of your driver does increase and miss decrease.

>> 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.

Yes. I just said simple. What I means kernel doesn't account whole memory
usage. :)

> 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.

kmemleak doesn't support page allocator and ioremap.
Above URL patch just can tell who requests page which is using(ie, not
free) now.


> 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.

If leak cause by alloc_page or __get_free_pages, kmemleak can't find leak.

>
> Chris
>


-- 
Kind regards,
Minchan Kim
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