Comment 92 for bug 151168

Revision history for this message
Jeremy Akers (irwinr12) wrote :

I'm not sure if I'm having the same issue, but I am experiencing some severe memory issues. After a reboot, free -m looks like this:

jeremy@dell:~$ free -m
             total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3033 724 2309 0 29 406
-/+ buffers/cache: 288 2745
Swap: 3773 0 3773

As you can see, I have 3GB of memory, and I'm using less than 300MB. No big deal. However, over the course of a week, the +/- buffers/cache line slowly increases to nearly 3GB. Running top and hitting shift + M does not show any processes hogging memory. In fact, the list looks almost identical to what it looks like immediately after a reboot. No more than 150 processes, and none are using higher than normal amounts of memory. And even if I shut down -everything- on my box, including GDM, X server, etc, and login to the console on CTRL-ALT-F2, my memory usage does not decrease at all.

I'm -guessing- this is some sort of kernel level driver leak with the nvidia driver, based on what I've read from others. But I do not know how to confirm this. Is there a way to get the kernel to print a mapping of it's internal address space to determine what's using this memory? Or does anyone have any other suggestions as to what to try?

I'm running Ubuntu 7.10, without Compiz (I completely uninstalled it)

The following packages are installed, related to nvidia:

linux-restricted-modules-2.6.20-15-generic
linux-restricted-modules-2.6.20-16-generic
linux-restricted-modules-2.6.22-14-generic
nvidia-glx-1:1.0.9639+2.6.22.4-14.10
nvidia-kernel-common-20051028+1ubuntu7
xserver-xorg-video-nv-1:2.1.5-1ubuntu1

My card, according to lspci -v

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G72 [GeForce 7300 LE] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
        Subsystem: Dell Unknown device 0405
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
        Memory at dd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
        Memory at c0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
        Memory at de000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
        [virtual] Expansion ROM at dfe00000 [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2
        Capabilities: [68] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-
        Capabilities: [78] Express Endpoint IRQ 0