Re: quicklists confuse meminfo

[Ingo Molnar]

* Thomas Gleixner <tglx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Bart reported http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9991. He 
> assumed a memory leak in 32bit kernels when he analyzed the output of 
> /proc/meminfo.
> 
> The leak is not a leak, it's an accounting bug. quicklists keep a 
> large amount of pages which are accounted as used memory.
[...]
> Another strange observation about quicklists is the imbalance of the 
> quicklists across CPUs. Running the above loop on a 2way machine I can 
> observe that the quicklist pages are acuumulating on one CPU. Stopping 
> and restarting the loop a couple of times can shift the accumulation 
> from one to the other CPU.

hm. I think we should not let this much RAM hang around in a 
special-purpose allocator like quicklists. Shouldnt the quicklists be 
temporary in nature, and be trimmed much more agressively?

in fact, we have a check_pgt_cache() call in cpu_idle(), which does:

        quicklist_trim(0, pgd_dtor, 25, 16);

but it appears we dont do quicklist trimming anywhere else! So if a 
system has no idle time, the quicklist can grow unbounded, and that's a 
real memory leak IMO.

	Ingo
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