Re: Kmemleak infrastructure improvement for task_struct leaks andcall_rcu()

From: Qian Cai
Date: Sun May 10 2020 - 17:30:35 EST




> On May 9, 2020, at 5:44 AM, Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, May 07, 2020 at 01:29:04PM -0400, Qian Cai wrote:
>> On May 7, 2020, at 1:16 PM, Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> I don't mind adding additional tracking info if it helps with debugging.
>>> But if it's for improving false positives, I'd prefer to look deeper
>>> into figure out why the pointer reference graph tracking failed.
>>
>> No, the task struct leaks are real leaks. It is just painful to figure
>> out the missing or misplaced put_task_struct() from the kmemleak
>> reports at the moment.
>
> We could log the callers to get_task_struct() and put_task_struct(),
> something like __builtin_return_address(0) (how does this work if the
> function is inlined?). If it's not the full backtrace, it shouldn't slow
> down kmemleak considerably. I don't think it's worth logging only the
> first/last calls to get/put. You'd hope that put is called in reverse
> order to get.
>
> I think it may be better if this is added as a new allocation pointed to
> from kmemleak_object rather than increasing this structure since it will
> be added on a case by case basis. When dumping the leak information, it
> would also dump the get/put calls, in the order they were called. We
> could add some simple refcount tracking (++ for get, -- for put) to
> easily notice any imbalance.
>
> I'm pretty busy next week but happy to review if you have a patch ;).

I am still thinking about a more generic way for all those refcount-based leaks without needing of manual annotation of all those places. Today, I had another one,

unreferenced object 0xe6ff008924f28500 (size 128):
comm "qemu-kvm", pid 4835, jiffies 4295141828 (age 6944.120s)
hex dump (first 32 bytes):
01 00 00 00 6b 6b 6b 6b 00 00 00 00 ad 4e ad de ....kkkk.....N..
ff ff ff ff 6b 6b 6b 6b ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ....kkkk........
backtrace:
[<000000005ed1a868>] slab_post_alloc_hook+0x74/0x9c
[<00000000c65ee7dc>] kmem_cache_alloc_trace+0x2b4/0x3d4
[<000000009efa9e6e>] do_eventfd+0x54/0x1ac
[<000000001146e724>] __arm64_sys_eventfd2+0x34/0x44
[<0000000096fc3a61>] do_el0_svc+0x128/0x1dc
[<000000005ae8f980>] el0_sync_handler+0xd0/0x268
[<0000000043f2c790>] el0_sync+0x164/0x180

That is eventfd_ctx_fileget() / eventfd_ctx_put() pairs.