Re: pidns memory leak

From: Daniel Lezcano
Date: Tue Oct 06 2009 - 04:20:13 EST


Sukadev Bhattiprolu wrote:
Daniel Lezcano [dlezcano@xxxxxxxxxx] wrote:
Hi,

I am facing a problem with the pid namespace when I launch the following lxc commands:

lxc-execute -n foo sleep 3600 &
ls -al /proc/$(pidof lxc-init)/exe && lxc-stop -n foo

All the processes related to the container are killed, but there is still a refcount on the pid_namespace which is never released.

Thanks for the bug report.

Did you notice any leak in 'struct pids' also or just the pid_namespace ?
If the pids are not leaking, this may be slightly different from the problem
Catalin Marinas ran into:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/29/406

I am not sure what you mean by 'struct pids' but what I observed is:

pid_2 and pid_namespace (as they are named in /proc/slabinfo) are never decremented.

And the pid_namespace does not seem to reproduce for me, with out the
'ls -al /proc/...' above, or with the simpler 'ns_exec' approach to
creating pid namespace.

I tried to write a simpler program but I failed to reproduce it.

I am going through the code for lxc-execute, but does it remount /proc in the container ?

Right, the parent does a clone(NEWMNT|NEWPID|NEWIPC|NEWUTS), wait for the child while this one (pid 1) 'execs' the lxc-init process. This program mounts /proc and fork-exec the command passed as parameter (here 'sleep 3600').

Without this intermediate process, the leak *seems* not happening.

If you don't access /proc/<pid>/<file>, the leak is not happening.

So to summarize:

Leak when:
----------

lxc-execute -n foo sleep 3600 &
ls -al /proc/$(pidof sleep)/exe && lxc-stop -n foo

The stop can be done, immediately after looking at the proc file or later, the leak happens in all the cases.

No leak when:
-------------
lxc-execute -n foo sleep 3600 &
lxc-stop -n foo


I tried to create a simpler program doing the same but that did not triggered the problem.

-- Daniel
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/