Re: Possible "struct pid" leak from tty_io.c

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

"Catalin Marinas" <catalin.marinas@gmail.com> writes:

> On 08/03/07, Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> wrote:
>> "Catalin Marinas" <catalin.marinas@gmail.com> writes:
>
> I think it's only the pid_chain and rcu member that could be placed in
> a list and kmemleak scans the memory for these two offsets as well.
> I'll check those lists anyway but I doubt it's a more fundamental
> problem with how kmemleak handles struct pid as I should've probably
> got more reports.

Right.  I was pointing out the possibilities but because we do
some tricky things.  Mostly I was wondering about the hlist for
the list of tasks.  Now if a task is on that list we should have
a struct pid_link pointing at our struct pid, so it shouldn't fool
kmemleak but I'm still a little curious if all of those hlist_heads are
NULL pointers.

>> In most any other layer we cache pids indefinitely and a situation
>> where we have a pointer to a struct pid with a ref count of 1 long
>> after the process goes away is expected.
>
> Yes, indeed, but what kmemleak reports is that the pid structure
> wasn't freed yet and there is no way to determine its pointer directly
> or via container_of on members (by scanning the memory), hence it is
> considered a leak.

Yes that sounds like a leak.

>> I don't understand your situation enough to guess what is going wrong
>> yet.  Hopefully I have given you enough information to get started.
>
> Yes, many thanks. I'll dig further and let you know.

Thanks....

Eric