Linux Kernel 2.0.31 -- Memory Leak Observations

Trever Adams (arabian@onramp.net)
Fri, 14 Nov 1997 03:34:27 -0600


First off, I will say, I don't care much about future 2.0.x, I would rather see 2.2.x out
soon and as near perfect (bug-free) as possible.

Here are my observations, unfortunately I have no numbers or oops/core dumps to help back it
up.

Using tar on a large archive on a fat/vfat drive (or any other large amount of fat/vfat
activity) seems to lead to a memory leak. This seems to always happen when I do more than
play a small wave/midi file or load a few text or word perfect files from fat/vfat.
Sometimes this is the only thing I will do and memory will disappear (with 72 meg of memory
and really nothing running it should not page swap, especially 208 pages that never go away
which is what is happening now, after the heavy activity).

Crashed, killed, and control-c ended programs don't seem to be cleaned up after leaving many
pages in memory that shouldnt be there.

If I am wrong, please show me how and where, if not, I hope this helps track down some of
the bugs.

Thanks to Linus and the rest of the active kernel gang for a great system, that is slowly
allowing me to not use Windows 95 for the most part. Almost to the point where it will be
the vfat partition that is ultrasmall.

Trever Adams
arabian@onramp.net