Kmemleak Introduction

Kernel Memory Leak Detector
===========================

Introduction
------------

Kmemleak provides a way of detecting possible kernel memory leaks in a
way similar to a tracing garbage collector
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_%28computer_science%29#Tracing_garbage_collectors),
with the difference that the orphan objects are not freed but only
reported via /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak. A similar method is used by the
Valgrind tool (memcheck --leak-check) to detect the memory leaks in
user-space applications.
Kmemleak is supported on x86, arm, powerpc, sparc, sh, microblaze, ppc, mips, s390, metag and tile.

Usage
-----

CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK in "Kernel hacking" has to be enabled. A kernel
thread scans the memory every 10 minutes (by default) and prints the
number of new unreferenced objects found. To display the details of all
the possible memory leaks:

  # mount -t debugfs nodev /sys/kernel/debug/
  # cat /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak

To trigger an intermediate memory scan:

  # echo scan > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak

To clear the list of all current possible memory leaks:

  # echo clear > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak

New leaks will then come up upon reading /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
again.

Note that the orphan objects are listed in the order they were allocated
and one object at the beginning of the list may cause other subsequent
objects to be reported as orphan.

Memory scanning parameters can be modified at run-time by writing to the
/sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak file. The following parameters are supported:

  off		- disable kmemleak (irreversible)
  stack=on	- enable the task stacks scanning (default)
  stack=off	- disable the tasks stacks scanning
  scan=on	- start the automatic memory scanning thread (default)
  scan=off	- stop the automatic memory scanning thread
  scan=<secs>	- set the automatic memory scanning period in seconds
		  (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,
		  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
the kernel command line.

Memory may be allocated or freed before kmemleak is initialised and
these actions are stored in an early log buffer. The size of this buffer
is configured via the CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK_EARLY_LOG_SIZE option.

If CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK_DEFAULT_OFF are enabled, the kmemleak is
disabled by default. Passing "kmemleak=on" on the kernel command
line enables the function. 

Basic Algorithm
---------------

The memory allocations via kmalloc, vmalloc, kmem_cache_alloc and
friends are traced and the pointers, together with additional
information like size and stack trace, are stored in a rbtree.
The corresponding freeing function calls are tracked and the pointers
removed from the kmemleak data structures.

An allocated block of memory is considered orphan if no pointer to its
start address or to any location inside the block can be found by
scanning the memory (including saved registers). This means that there
might be no way for the kernel to pass the address of the allocated
block to a freeing function and therefore the block is considered a
memory leak.

The scanning algorithm steps:

  1. mark all objects as white (remaining white objects will later be
     considered orphan)
  2. scan the memory starting with the data section and stacks, checking
     the values against the addresses stored in the rbtree. If
     a pointer to a white object is found, the object is added to the
     gray list
  3. scan the gray objects for matching addresses (some white objects
     can become gray and added at the end of the gray list) until the
     gray set is finished
  4. the remaining white objects are considered orphan and reported via
     /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak

Some allocated memory blocks have pointers stored in the kernel's
internal data structures and they cannot be detected as orphans. To
avoid this, kmemleak can also store the number of values pointing to an
address inside the block address range that need to be found so that the
block is not considered a leak. One example is __vmalloc().

Testing specific sections with kmemleak
---------------------------------------

Upon initial bootup your /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak output page may be
quite extensive. This can also be the case if you have very buggy code
when doing development. To work around these situations you can use the
'clear' command to clear all reported unreferenced objects from the
/sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak output. By issuing a 'scan' after a 'clear'
you can find new unreferenced objects; this should help with testing
specific sections of code.

To test a critical section on demand with a clean kmemleak do:

  # echo clear > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
  ... test your kernel or modules ...
  # echo scan > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak

Then as usual to get your report with:

  # cat /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak

Freeing kmemleak internal objects
---------------------------------

To allow access to previously 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
------------

See the include/linux/kmemleak.h header for the functions prototype.

kmemleak_init		 - initialize kmemleak
kmemleak_alloc		 - notify of a memory block allocation
kmemleak_alloc_percpu	 - notify of a percpu memory block allocation
kmemleak_free		 - notify of a memory block freeing
kmemleak_free_part	 - notify of a partial memory block freeing
kmemleak_free_percpu	 - notify of a percpu memory block freeing
kmemleak_update_trace	 - update object allocation stack trace
kmemleak_not_leak	 - mark an object as not a leak
kmemleak_ignore		 - do not scan or report an object as leak
kmemleak_scan_area	 - add scan areas inside a memory block
kmemleak_no_scan	 - do not scan a memory block
kmemleak_erase		 - erase an old value in a pointer variable
kmemleak_alloc_recursive - as kmemleak_alloc but checks the recursiveness
kmemleak_free_recursive	 - as kmemleak_free but checks the recursiveness

Dealing with false positives/negatives
--------------------------------------

The false negatives are real memory leaks (orphan objects) but not
reported by kmemleak because values found during the memory scanning
point to such objects. To reduce the number of false negatives, kmemleak
provides the kmemleak_ignore, kmemleak_scan_area, kmemleak_no_scan and
kmemleak_erase functions (see above). The task stacks also increase the
amount of false negatives and their scanning is not enabled by default.

The false positives are objects wrongly reported as being memory leaks
(orphan). For objects known not to be leaks, kmemleak provides the
kmemleak_not_leak function. The kmemleak_ignore could also be used if
the memory block is known not to contain other pointers and it will no
longer be scanned.

Some of the reported leaks are only transient, especially on SMP
systems, because of pointers temporarily stored in CPU registers or
stacks. Kmemleak defines MSECS_MIN_AGE (defaulting to 1000) representing
the minimum age of an object to be reported as a memory leak.

Limitations and Drawbacks
-------------------------

The main drawback is the reduced performance of memory allocation and
freeing. To avoid other penalties, the memory scanning is only performed
when the /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak file is read. Anyway, this tool is
intended for debugging purposes where the performance might not be the
most important requirement.

To keep the algorithm simple, kmemleak scans for values pointing to any
address inside a block's address range. This may lead to an increased
number of false negatives. However, it is likely that a real memory leak
will eventually become visible.

Another source of false negatives is the data stored in non-pointer
values. In a future version, kmemleak could only scan the pointer
members in the allocated structures. This feature would solve many of
the false negative cases described above.

The tool can report false positives. These are cases where an allocated
block doesn't need to be freed (some cases in the init_call functions),
the pointer is calculated by other methods than the usual container_of
macro or the pointer is stored in a location not scanned by kmemleak.

Page allocations and ioremap are not tracked.

</pre><pre code_snippet_id="1560499" snippet_file_name="blog_20160120_3_161571" class="wiki" name="code" style="white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 26px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">一、 检测工具介绍

Kmemleak工作于内核态，Kmemleak 提供了一种可选的内核泄漏检测，其方法类似于跟踪内存收集器。当独立的对象没有被释放时，其报告记录在 /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak中，Kmemcheck能够帮助定位大多数内存错误的上下文。

Kmemleak使用过程概述
首先CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK 在Kernel hacking中被使能.
查看内核打印信息详细过程如下：
1、挂载debugfs文件系统
   mount -t debugfs nodev /sys/kernel/debug/
2、开启内核自动检测线程
   echo scan > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
3、查看打印信息
   cat /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
4、清除内核检测报告，新的内存泄露报告将重新写入/sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
   echo clear > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak

内存扫描参数可以进行修改通过向/sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak 文件写入。 参数使用如下：
  off 禁用kmemleak（不可逆）
  stack=on 启用任务堆栈扫描(default)
  stack=off 禁用任务堆栈扫描
  scan=on 启动自动记忆扫描线程(default)
  scan=off 停止自动记忆扫描线程
  scan=<secs> 设置n秒内自动记忆扫描
  scan 开启内核扫描
  clear 清除内存泄露报告
  dump=<addr> 转存信息对象在<addr>
通过“kmemleak = OFF”，也可以在启动时禁用Kmemleak在内核命令行。在初始化kmemleak之前，内存的分配或释放这些动作被存储在一个前期日志缓冲区。这个缓冲区的大小通过配CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK_EARLY_LOG_SIZE设置。 

二、 Kmemleak动态检测原理

通过的kmalloc、vmalloc、kmem_cache_alloc等内存分配会跟踪其指针，连同其他的分配大小和堆栈跟踪信息，存储在PRIO搜索树。相应的释放函数调用跟踪和指针就会从kmemleak数据结构中移除。
分配的内存块，被认为是独立的，如果没有指针指向它起始地址或块的内部的任何位置，可以发现扫描内存（包括已保存的寄存器）。这意味着，有可能没有办法为内核通过所分配的地址传递块到一个释放函数，因此，该块被认为是一个内存泄漏。

扫描算法步骤：
  1。标记的所有分配对象为白色（稍后将剩余的白色物体考虑独立的）
  2。扫描存储器与所述数据片段和栈开始，检查对地址的值存储在PRIO搜索树。如果一个白色的对象的指针被发现，该对象将被添加到灰名单
  3。扫描的灰色对象匹配的地址（一些白色物体可以变成灰色，并添加结束时的灰名单），直到黑色集结束
  4。剩下的白色物体被认为是独立儿，并报告写入/sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak。
一些分配的内存块的指针在内核的内部数据结构和它们不能被检测为孤儿。对避免这种情况，kmemleak也可以存储的数量的值，指向一个内的块的地址范围内的地址，需要找到使块不被认为是泄漏。 

三、kmem相关函数
从kernel源代码中的目录include /linux/kmemleak.h中可查看函数原型的头。
kmemleak_init  初始化kmemleak
kmemleak_alloc 一个内存块分配的通知
kmemleak_alloc_percpu 通知的一个percpu的内存块分配
kmemleak_free         通知的内存块释放
kmemleak_free_part    通知释放部分内存块
kmemleak_free_percpu  一个percpu内存块释放的通知
kmemleak_not_leak    当不是泄露时，标记对象
kmemleak_ignore      当泄漏时不扫描或报告对象
kmemleak_scan_area   添加扫描区域内的内存块
kmemleak_no_scan     不扫描的内存块
kmemleak_erase       删除一个指针变量的旧值
kmemleak_alloc_recursive为kmemleak_alloc，只检查递归
kmemleak_free_recursive 为kmemleak_free，只检查递归 

SOP:

<p><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(53, 54, 48);">1. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(53, 54, 48);">Enabel</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(53, 54, 48);"> kernel </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(53, 54, 48);">config</span></p><p><span style="color:#353630;">  >>CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK=y</span></p><p><span style="color:#353630;">  >>CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK_EARLY_LOG_SIZE=2000</span></p><p><span style="color:#353630;">2. echo clear > /sys/kernel/debug/</span><span style="color:#353630;">kmemleak</span></p><p><span style="color:#353630;">3. start test (with cat /proc/</span><span style="color:#353630;">meminfo</span><span style="color:#353630;">)</span></p><p><span style="color:#353630;">4</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(53, 54, 48);">. echo scan > /sys/kernel/debug/</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(53, 54, 48);">kmemleak</span></p><p><span style="color:#353630;">5. cat /sys/kernel/debug/</span><span style="color:#353630;">kmemleak</span><span style="color:#353630;">> /3rd_rw/kmemleak.log</span></p><p><span style="color:#353630;">6. 分析获取到的log信息</span></p>