kmemleak: allow freeing internal objects after kmemleak was disabled
Currently if kmemleak is disabled, the kmemleak objects can never be
freed, no matter if it's disabled by a user or due to fatal errors.
Those objects can be a big waste of memory.
OBJS ACTIVE USE OBJ SIZE SLABS OBJ/SLAB CACHE SIZE NAME
1200264 1197433 99% 0.30K 46164 26 369312K kmemleak_object
With this patch, after kmemleak was disabled you can reclaim memory
with:
# echo clear > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
Also inform users about this with a printk.
Signed-off-by: Li Zefan <lizefan@huawei.com>
Acked-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
diff --git a/Documentation/kmemleak.txt b/Documentation/kmemleak.txt
index b6e3973..6c18be9 100644
--- a/Documentation/kmemleak.txt
+++ b/Documentation/kmemleak.txt
@@ -53,7 +53,8 @@
(default 600, 0 to stop the automatic scanning)
scan - trigger a memory scan
clear - clear list of current memory leak suspects, done by
- marking all current reported unreferenced objects grey
+ marking all current reported unreferenced objects grey,
+ or free all kmemleak objects if kmemleak has been disabled.
dump=<addr> - dump information about the object found at <addr>
Kmemleak can also be disabled at boot-time by passing "kmemleak=off" on
@@ -120,6 +121,18 @@
# cat /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
+Freeing kmemleak internal objects
+---------------------------------
+
+To allow access to previosuly found memory leaks after kmemleak has been
+disabled by the user or due to an fatal error, internal kmemleak objects
+won't be freed when kmemleak is disabled, and those objects may occupy
+a large part of physical memory.
+
+In this situation, you may reclaim memory with:
+
+ # echo clear > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
+
Kmemleak API
------------