Detecting kernel memory leaks [LWN.net]

Detecting kernel memory leaks

Posted Jun 22, 2006 8:58 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
Parent article: Detecting kernel memory leaks

The question ofcourse is: has it found anything yet?

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Detecting kernel memory leaks

Posted Jun 22, 2006 9:39 UTC (Thu) by mingo (subscriber, #31122) [Link] (1 responses)

yep, even in its current (very) limited testing kmemleak found a real ACPI memory leak, with some more suspected ACPI leaks being analyzed.

We should also note that prior Coverity checking clean-sweeped some of the 'easy' memory-leaks, artificially reducing the visible efficiency of this GPL-ed tool.

(It could be tested by intentionally re-introducing some of the Coverity fixes but that's hard and laborous because not all Coverity fixes are identified as such and the code might have changed meanwhile.)

Detecting kernel memory leaks

Posted Jul 27, 2006 8:41 UTC (Thu) by cmarinas (subscriber, #39468) [Link]

(a bit late with replying but I only saw the article now)

There is no need to re-introduce the bugs found by Coverity as kmemleak managed to find some real leaks (I think about 4-5 at the moment - ACPI, i386 setup, SE Linux and a case of vfree used instead of vunmap in the ARM code) which Coverity wouldn't have been able to see because of the code complexity.

Coverity, however, can find potential leaks before they actually happen since it does a static analysis of the code.