2.4.21-pre1: Memory leak in buffer code?

Hi.

This script seems to reveal a memory leak of some sort in the buffer code. I have run it on the same filesystem mounted as both ext2 and ext3 under 2.4.21-pre1, and in both cases get decreasing free memory and increasing buffers. The line which activates the problem is the echo which is directed to testlog.

#!/bin/bash

RUN=1

while [ 1 ]; do

	MEMFREE=`head -2 /proc/meminfo | tail -1 | awk -F ' ' '{ print $4 }'`
	BUFFERS=`head -2 /proc/meminfo | tail -1 | awk -F ' ' '{ print $6 }'`

echo -e -n "\rIteration $ITERATION. MemFree is $MEMFREE. Buffers is $BUFFERS" echo "Run $ITERATION beginning at date" > /testlog ITERATION=$(($ITERATION+1))
done

I think I can also shed some light on a possible area to look at. I originally found the problem while examining what appeared to be a memory leak in swsusp. I set things up to bug on a page allocation where the memory leak seemed to occur, and the page allocation was being called from __pollwait in fs/select.c.

Hope this is helpful.

Nigel

Nigel Cunningham
495 St Georges Road South, Hastings 4201, New Zealand

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	-- 2 Timothy 2:14, NASB.