buffer leakage in kernel?

[Roman Dementiev <dementiev@mpi-sb.mpg.de>]

Hello everyone,

I've met with following problem (kernel 2.4.20-pre4 ):
I write and read sequentially from/to 8 files each of 64 Gbytes (not a
mistake, 64 Gbyte),
each on different disk. The files are opened with flag O_DIRECT. I have
1 Gbyte RAM, no swap.
While this scanning is running, number of "buffers" reported by ''free"
and in /proc/meminfo
is continuously increasing up to ~ 500 MB !! When the program exits
normally or I break it, number
of "buffers" does not decrease and even increases if I do operations on
other files.

This is not nice at all when I have another applications running
with memory consumption > 500 MB: when my "scanner" approaches 50G
border on
each disk, I've got numerous  "Out of memory" murders :(. Even 'ssh' to
this machine
is killed :(

Could anyone explain why it happens? I suppose that it is a memory
leakage in
file system buffer management.
Is it fixed already in any patch?


Bye,
Roman