Bug#561890: lenny kernel memory leak?
Package: linux-2.6
Version: 2.6.26-19lenny2
Severity: important
-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Mikko Rapeli <mikko.rapeli@iki.fi>
To: debian-kernel@lists.debian.org
Subject: lenny kernel memory leak?
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:36:56 +0200
Newsgroups: gmane.linux.debian.devel.kernel
(maybe debian-kernel is a better place to ask than debian-user)
I have an old home gateway with 32 MB of ram running email, apache 1.3 with
some static files and an rt2500 based ad-hoc mode WLAN AP with dnsmasq.
Since upgrade from etch to lenny, I've seen a number of OOM situations and
slow downs after a few days of uptime. Is there some perhaps known memory leak
in lenny 2.6.26 kernels, perhaps in rt2500 driver?
In ad-hoc mode the rt2500 driver very chatty about so I disabled klogd for
now, but AFAIK kernel uses a ring buffer which should not slow anything down.
Here's a diff of /proc/meminfo after boot and when seeing a dramatic slow down
after a few days of uptime. I think the anonpages difference shows a memory
leak in kernel, am I correct?
-Mikko
ps. please cc me in replies, thanks.
--- meminfo_after_boot.txt 2009-12-14 14:28:25.000000000 +0200
+++ meminfo_slow.txt 2009-12-14 14:24:01.000000000 +0200
@@ -1,28 +1,28 @@
MemTotal: 29228 kB
-MemFree: 1172 kB
-Buffers: 552 kB
-Cached: 7488 kB
-SwapCached: 404 kB
-Active: 17292 kB
-Inactive: 2632 kB
+MemFree: 1392 kB
+Buffers: 168 kB
+Cached: 1744 kB
+SwapCached: 736 kB
+Active: 1360 kB
+Inactive: 1348 kB
SwapTotal: 204792 kB
-SwapFree: 195728 kB
+SwapFree: 164480 kB
Dirty: 0 kB
-Writeback: 0 kB
-AnonPages: 11652 kB
-Mapped: 5132 kB
-Slab: 4276 kB
-SReclaimable: 1108 kB
-SUnreclaim: 3168 kB
-PageTables: 556 kB
+Writeback: 260 kB
+AnonPages: 384 kB
+Mapped: 928 kB
+Slab: 21048 kB
+SReclaimable: 952 kB
+SUnreclaim: 20096 kB
+PageTables: 688 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 219404 kB
-Committed_AS: 33172 kB
+Committed_AS: 53648 kB
VmallocTotal: 1007300 kB
VmallocUsed: 2500 kB
-VmallocChunk: 1004556 kB
+VmallocChunk: 1004624 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
--
Ben Hutchings
Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.
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