Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 10:49:25 -0700 From: Fred Gilham <gilham@csl.sri.com> To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Weird problem with devstat interface Message-ID: <200506281749.j5SHnPlr017616@quarter.csl.sri.com>
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Hello, There's a program called xsysinfo in the ports collection which currently seems to be just about the only working system status program for FreeBSD 5 or 6. Unfortunately the current version seems to have a memory leak. This memory leak isn't related to the program itself but to the devstat interface. By this I mean that it's not caused by any malloc or free that the program's code does. If you run this program for a few days it will grow to hundreds of megabytes in size and eventually exhaust memory. It does this under FBSD 5 & 6 but not 4 (which of course uses a different interface to the kernel stats). The program will not do this if you use the -nodisk option telling it not to track disk statistics, which means that the problem gets narrowed down to the devstat stuff that is used to keep track of disk transfers. I have been able to get the program to stop doing this by changing the calls to devstat_checkversion() devstat_getnumdevs() devstat_getdevs() so they don't use the kvm interface but the sysctl interface (i.e. passing NULL instead of a file descriptor to /dev/kvm). It seems like there's either a bug in the port or some weirdness in the devstat interface, so I thought I'd post about it to see if anyone knew what was going on. -- Fred Gilham gilham@csl.sri.com The PTPL (People's Trotskyist Programming League) believes that hackers are elitist and that all software should be created by the masses flailing away at millions of keyboards. I didn't have the heart to tell them that this has already been tried and the result is called Linux.
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