Re: kmemleak errors

[Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>]

On Fri, 2009-10-16 at 13:39 +0800, Peter Teoh wrote:
> sorry, i have overwritten the kernel image to follow up on another
> kernel bugzilla report.   but on another (32bit Fedora Core10) the
> following is the kmemleak output (scan > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak is
> done at least thrice) and the following output remained exactly not
> changed - not even a single byte modified:
> 
> unreferenced object 0xf70320a0 (size 32):
>   comm "swapper", pid 0, jiffies 4294667388
>   hex dump (first 32 bytes):
>     01 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
>     00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
>   backtrace:
>     [<c08aa375>] kmemleak_alloc+0x100/0x13e
>     [<c0525ea9>] __kmalloc_track_caller+0x29f/0x315
>     [<c04ff1a8>] kmemdup+0x22/0x5a
>     [<c0624ad2>] selinux_cred_prepare+0x18/0x41
>     [<c0613437>] security_prepare_creds+0x15/0x18
>     [<c047af05>] prepare_creds+0xc4/0xeb
>     [<c047b537>] copy_creds+0x8a/0x2c5
>     [<c044eff6>] copy_process+0x31e/0x17bf
>     [<c04506ed>] do_fork+0x256/0x556
>     [<c04024d1>] kernel_thread+0x85/0x8d
>     [<c08a85ea>] rest_init+0x1e/0x5a
>     [<c0d34b5c>] start_kernel+0x383/0x388
>     [<c0d340ae>] i386_start_kernel+0xae/0xb3
>     [<ffffffff>] 0xffffffff

Possibly real leak. I cc'ed David Howells since he seems to be touching
this code more frequently.

> unreferenced object 0xf7253200 (size 32):
>   comm "swapper", pid 1, jiffies 4294669642
>   hex dump (first 32 bytes):
>     a0 36 25 f7 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  .6%.............
>     00 00 00 00 44 5f 25 f6 72 b7 47 c0 00 00 00 00  ....D_%.r.G.....
>   backtrace:
>     [<c08aa375>] kmemleak_alloc+0x100/0x13e
>     [<c0525147>] kmem_cache_alloc+0x184/0x20a
>     [<c0d5cb39>] kmemleak_test_init+0x25/0x6e8
>     [<c040116a>] do_one_initcall+0x78/0x1fb
>     [<c0d343e6>] kernel_init+0x160/0x1dd
>     [<c0404e33>] kernel_thread_helper+0x7/0x10
>     [<ffffffff>] 0xffffffff

Please disable the kmemleak testing module as it introduces leaks
explicitly for testing kmemleak.

> unreferenced object 0xf5c16270 (size 16):
>   comm "swapper", pid 1, jiffies 4294673952
>   hex dump (first 16 bytes):
>     01 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
>   backtrace:
>     [<c08aa375>] kmemleak_alloc+0x100/0x13e
>     [<c0525147>] kmem_cache_alloc+0x184/0x20a
>     [<c0620df4>] selinux_file_alloc_security+0x34/0xdd
>     [<c06132ed>] security_file_alloc+0x14/0x16
>     [<c0530b97>] get_empty_filp+0x10d/0x21d
>     [<c053f964>] do_filp_open+0x15d/0xebc
>     [<c052c10e>] do_sys_open+0x93/0x16a
>     [<c052c231>] sys_open+0x23/0x2b
>     [<c0401322>] init_post+0x35/0x18f
>     [<c0d34459>] kernel_init+0x1d3/0x1dd
>     [<c0404e33>] kernel_thread_helper+0x7/0x10
>     [<ffffffff>] 0xffffffff

Some of these could be triggered by an earlier leak, so resolving the
first one would automatically make the rest disappear. It could also be
that they are just false positive - pointers to them are stored in an
area not scanned by kmemleak (like the one below).

> unreferenced object 0xf58067c0 (size 32):
>   comm "modprobe", pid 2123, jiffies 4294698474
>   hex dump (first 32 bytes):
>     34 7e 60 f8 c0 6f 80 f5 50 d5 da f5 60 d5 da f5  4~`..o..P...`...
>     00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
>   backtrace:
>     [<c08aa375>] kmemleak_alloc+0x100/0x13e
>     [<c0525147>] kmem_cache_alloc+0x184/0x20a
>     [<c04d3973>] trace_define_field+0x23/0x192
>     [<c04d3aff>] trace_define_common_fields+0x1d/0x12a
>     [<f85d3c7e>] ftrace_define_fields_i915_ring_wait_end+0x10/0x67 [i915]
>     [<c04d3069>] event_create_dir+0x3d7/0x45a
>     [<c04d33f3>] trace_module_notify+0x307/0x568
>     [<c08c89d8>] notifier_call_chain+0x30/0x7f
>     [<c0479958>] __blocking_notifier_call_chain+0x52/0x67
>     [<c047997e>] blocking_notifier_call_chain+0x11/0x13
>     [<c0493009>] sys_init_module+0xd9/0x273
>     [<c04041d8>] sysenter_do_call+0x12/0x2d
>     [<ffffffff>] 0xffffffff

These look like false positives since kmemleak doesn't scan all the
sections in a module. I proposed a patch here:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/10/15/155

But it doesn't seem to fix it. I'll send another.

-- 
Catalin