[lug] Memory Leak Detection

[Michael Hirsch]

On Apr 1, 2005 2:29 PM, D. Stimits <stimits at comcast.net> wrote:
> ...
> > After much testing, we can only cause the failure to occur
> > maybe once every two weeks. In talking it over, we are
> > wondering if this failure is related to the failures that we
> > were getting before we expanded the memory. More
> > specifically, we're wondering if there is a memory leak
> > somewhere in the code.
> >
> > My question is, how would we go about doing a test for a
> > memory leak in this situation?
> 
> I think specific tools might depend on the language it's written in. For
> C you could maybe use Valgrind (http://valgrind.org), and there are some
> similar libs out there for memory debugging.
> 
> One thing I've noticed about memory failures is that sometimes marginal
> ram will work for several weeks then fail. Adding more memory and
> placing it in the lower memory slot can shift the location of the bad
> memory and reduce how often the problem is seen. Would memtest86 work on
> a PC104?

But it sounds to me like this memory leak might be in the kernel (eth
driver), not in user space.  Does valgrind work there?

Michael