mjhjmtu

I have a large multi-threaded open source application which uses proprietary OpenGL libraries, Wayland Weston, and a proprietary graphics driver in the Linux kernel. The drivers are currently under development, so there is a strong possibility that they have errors.

I have observed the following symptoms:

(1) Free memory ($ free -m) is continuously consumed while running my application. At a steady state, it consumes about 5MB/minute.

(2) If I stop and start my application continuously, I am able to accelerate the rate of memory loss. It looks like I lose about 0.5MB every time I restart the application.

(3) When I stop my application, the memory is not returned to the system. The memory is returned only after a power cycle.

(4) I have started to log memory usage, as well as taking snapshots of /proc/<pid>/smaps. I can see which thread consumes the memory, and I will investigate further.

(5) inspection of the smaps file shows that, over time, the older snapshot has consumed more memory. There are also more "anon_inode:dmabuf" entries in the older snapshot, and this looks similar to these issues:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28097766/where-does-the-dev-zero-deleted-anon-inodedmabuf-comes-from-in-proc-p

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100298

Is this memory leak more likely to be a user space memory leak or a kernel memory leak?

What other diagnostics can I perform to narrow down the likely source of leaks?