Re: request_firmware API exhaust memory

[Tomas Winkler <tomasw@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 6:19 PM, Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-04-26 at 12:38 +0200, Kay Sievers wrote:
>> On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 22:09, Tomas Winkler <tomasw@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Said thing is that I don't see where the memory goes.... Anyhow I will
>> > try to run valgrin on udev just to be sure.
>>
>> Nah, that memory would be freed, if you kill all udev processes, which
>> it doesn't.
>>
>> The many udev worker processes you see for a few seconds was caused by
>> udevd handling events with TIMEOUT= set special. We need to make sure,
>> that firmware events run immediately and don't wait for other
>> processes to finish. The logic who does that was always creating a new
>> worker. I changed this now, but this will not affect the underlying
>> problem you are seeing, it will just make the udev workers not grow in
>> a timeframe of less than 10 seconds. The change is here:
>>   http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/hotplug/udev.git;a=commit;h=665ee17def2caa6811ae032ae68ebf8239a18cf8
>> but as mentioned, this change is unrelated to the memory leak you are seeing.
>>
>> > I'll be glad If someone can run my simple driver I posted and confirm
>> > that sees the same problem
>>
>> I can confirm that memory gets lost. I suspect for some reason the
>> firmware does not get properly cleaned up. If you increase the size of
>> the firmware image, it will leak memory much faster.
>
> I guess, the assumption that vfree() will free pages which are allocated
> by custom code, and not by vmalloc(), is not true.
>
> The attached changes seem to fix the issue for me.
>
> The custom page array mangling was introduced by David as an optimization
> with commit 6e03a201bbe8137487f340d26aa662110e324b20 and this should be
> checked, and if needed be fixed.
>
> Cheers,
> Kay
>
>
> diff --git a/drivers/base/firmware_class.c b/drivers/base/firmware_class.c
> index 985da11..fe4e872 100644
> --- a/drivers/base/firmware_class.c
> +++ b/drivers/base/firmware_class.c
> @@ -162,7 +162,7 @@ static ssize_t firmware_loading_store(struct device *dev,
>                        mutex_unlock(&fw_lock);
>                        break;
>                }
> -               vfree(fw_priv->fw->data);
> +               vunmap(fw_priv->fw->data);
>                fw_priv->fw->data = NULL;
>                for (i = 0; i < fw_priv->nr_pages; i++)
>                        __free_page(fw_priv->pages[i]);
> @@ -176,7 +176,7 @@ static ssize_t firmware_loading_store(struct device *dev,
>                break;
>        case 0:
>                if (test_bit(FW_STATUS_LOADING, &fw_priv->status)) {
> -                       vfree(fw_priv->fw->data);
> +                       vunmap(fw_priv->fw->data);
>                        fw_priv->fw->data = vmap(fw_priv->pages,
>                                                 fw_priv->nr_pages,
>                                                 0, PAGE_KERNEL_RO);
> @@ -184,9 +184,6 @@ static ssize_t firmware_loading_store(struct device *dev,
>                                dev_err(dev, "%s: vmap() failed\n", __func__);
>                                goto err;
>                        }
> -                       /* Pages will be freed by vfree() */
> -                       fw_priv->page_array_size = 0;
> -                       fw_priv->nr_pages = 0;
>                        complete(&fw_priv->completion);
>                        clear_bit(FW_STATUS_LOADING, &fw_priv->status);
>                        break;
> @@ -578,7 +575,7 @@ release_firmware(const struct firmware *fw)
>                        if (fw->data == builtin->data)
>                                goto free_fw;
>                }
> -               vfree(fw->data);
> +               vunmap(fw->data);
>        free_fw:
>                kfree(fw);
>        }

Thanks for your effort I will test it tomorrow
Tomas