Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 0 of 3] libxl: memory leaks

[Gianni Tedesco <gianni.tedesco@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2010-08-03 at 08:59 +0100, Vincent Hanquez wrote:
> On 02/08/10 15:05, Gianni Tedesco (3P) wrote:
> > It's no big secret or mystery - I only mentioned it because I had
> > planned to start work on it quite soon :)
> >
> > Basically it is to implement properly the current pointer tracking code
> > in libxl such that allocations via libxl_(sprintf|malloc) and so on are
> > automatically free'd when returning out of the library to a caller.
> > Objects returned to callers will still be expected to be free()'d...
> 
> What about, what's wrong with the original design ?
> the original design being you stuff everything in the context memtrack 
> and expect all the objects allocated by libxl (internal AND returned to 
> the caller) to be free by a ctx_free. This provides a strong proven 
> guarantee that *everything* has been free.

I wasn't aware that was the original design. It's certainly not the case
right now.

AFAICS that scheme would only guarantee everything has been freed if the
caller calls ctx_free() at appropriate points. If libxl were used in a
daemon, for example, it would not be simple to come up with a scheme
that guarantees memory bounds that are independent from uptime.

Also, a simpler way to free everything is exit() :)


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