[OpenAFS-devel] vmalloc memory leak in 1.3.84/85?

[Miles Davis]

On Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 04:20:10PM -0700, Miles Davis wrote:
> 
> I think I may have come across a memory leak in 1.3.84/1.3.85. It's 
> happening on a heavily used shell/imap/pop server running Fedora Core 4, 
> kernel 2.6.12-1.1398_FC4smp. I first noticed the problem after upgrading 
> the box to FC4 from RedHat 9, when it crashed after about 8 hours with a 
> kernel panic (see attachment).
> 
> I increased the vmalloc size to 256MB, and thought it was helping when 
> the vmalloc memory usage seemed to taper off around 220MB (by taper off, 
> I mean that the slope of the increase was no longer a straight line), 
> but it crept up again in a more jagged pattern until it once again 
> exhausted the vmalloc area.

Found it. A combination of long lived (24h) tokens and frequent, short 
lived sessions (imap, pop) filled up the vmalloc area. The odd thing is 
that the afs client doesn't seem to free up vmalloc space when tokens 
are destroyed (say, through pam_krb5 or unlog). The memory remains 
allocated until some time after the token expires. Is that expected?

-- 
// Miles Davis - miles@cs.stanford.edu - http://www.cs.stanford.edu/~miles
// Computer Science Department - Computer Facilities
// Stanford University