On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, Joe Wong wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > Is there any tools that can detect memory leak in kernel loadable
> > module?
> >
> > TIA.
> >
> > - Joe
>
> How would it know? If you can answer that question, you have made
> the tool. It would be specific to your module. FYI, in designing
> such a tool, you often the find the leak, which means you don't
> need the tool anymore.
>
> I would start by temporarily putting a wrapper around whatever you
> use for memory allocation and deallocation. The wrapper code keeps
> track of pointer values and outstanding allocations. If the outstanding
> allocations grow or if the pointers to whatever_free() are different
> than the pointers to whatever_alloc(), you have a leak. You can read
> the results from a private ioctl().
Close to how memleak works. Wrap all allocators, and maintain a 1/32
scale model of memory consisting of tags showing who allocated that
ram-clod when. Read allocation array via proc.
For most leaks, you're right.. the tool is too much horsepower for
the problem. Memleak has found some very non-trivial leaks though.
It found one that was irritating Ingo quite a bit, and he designed
memleak :)
-Mike
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Feb 23 2002 - 21:00:35 EST