Re: [PATCH 1/1] mm: Fix memory leak on mm_init error handling

[Shakeel Butt]

On Thu, Mar 30, 2023 at 12:42 PM Andrew Morton
<akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 30 Mar 2023 09:38:22 -0400 Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > commit f1a7941243c1 ("mm: convert mm's rss stats into percpu_counter")
> > introduces a memory leak by missing a call to destroy_context() when a
> > percpu_counter fails to allocate.
> >
> > Before introducing the per-cpu counter allocations, init_new_context()
> > was the last call that could fail in mm_init(), and thus there was no
> > need to ever invoke destroy_context() in the error paths. Adding the
> > following percpu counter allocations adds error paths after
> > init_new_context(), which means its associated destroy_context() needs
> > to be called when percpu counters fail to allocate.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > --- a/kernel/fork.c
> > +++ b/kernel/fork.c
> > @@ -1171,6 +1171,7 @@ static struct mm_struct *mm_init(struct mm_struct *mm, struct task_struct *p,
> >  fail_pcpu:
> >       while (i > 0)
> >               percpu_counter_destroy(&mm->rss_stat[--i]);
> > +     destroy_context(mm);
> >  fail_nocontext:
> >       mm_free_pgd(mm);
> >  fail_nopgd:
>
> Is there really a leak?  I wasn't able to find a version of
> init_new_context() which performs allocation.
>

There are more than 20 archs defining this function and I couldn't
check each one of them. I think we can assume there might be new
allocation in the future.