[rhn-users] Horrendous Memory Leak???

[Kenneth Sarno]

I'm running the current WS 3 kernel (although older kernels exhibit the 
same problem) on an Athlon 3200+ in a Soyo KT880 motherboard with 1GB, 
using it as a Samba file server for my little home network. Nothing runs on 
it except a software raid 5 with four 200GB drives, which is shared with a 
couple of Wintel boxes and Macs in my house using Samba.

If I boot it up and just let it sit there for a day or two, then log in to 
a gnome desktop, the system monitor shows 990MB of memory used plus a 
couple of hundred MB of swap used too. This is with no users ever having 
logged in, except root just to check the system monitor, one time only. 
Basically nothing has happened since boot, not even any network activity 
against the raid to speak of. Haven't even played solitaire or run a 
browser. The memory usage accounted for on the ps -e display is a couple 
hundred MB, mostly basic GUI infrastructure stuff, nothing you'd even call 
an application. There's something like 700 or 800MB unaccounted for, and it 
would probably be even more if I knew how to check for the memory leak 
without going into a GUI.

The only thing different about this system from a totally stock binary 
kernel is the installation of 3 driver modules: libsata and sata-via (to 
handle two of the IDE drives in the raid) and the GBE network chip driver 
module, 'velocityget', which I downloaded and compiled from Via to handle 
their onboard 6122 network controller. To all outward appearances these 
devices work just fine.

The sata drivers are supplied by Red Hat but unsupported. The net driver is 
supplied by Via but unsupported. Not being a kernel guru (or any kind of 
guru), I don't know how to even start finding out if this egregious leak is 
in one of these drivers or someplace else.

Any advice would be appreciated.

--Ken S.

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