Memory leak / dmesg

[Jouni Malinen]

On Thu, Apr 13, 2006 at 12:32:51PM -0700, Tom Sharples wrote:

> We have a Prism / hostap dual-radio wrap box that has been running fine for months until rather recently, when it began to show a severe memory leak that kills the box about every half hour or so. Looking at dmesg I'm seeing a lot of the following new stuff, and am wondering if this is related to our problem. Can anyone let me know what this "extra data 10 bytes / 16 bytes" thing is about, and what we can do to rectify it?

Which kernel and hostap-driver versions are you using? Did you change
something in software/configuration recently or did this memory leak
show up without any changes in the AP?

Can you please capture /proc/slabinfo from the board once a minute until
it dies and send those files? That could provide some more details on
where the memory is going.

I don't think that this extra data notification about association
request frames would have anything to do with the memory leak, though.

> wlan1: assoc from 00:0d:88:c2:5b:d4 with extra data (10 bytes) [<32><08><0c><12><18><24><30><48><60><6c>]

The driver does not know what do with new information elements and it
just ignores them. In other words, this debug message can be ignored. It
should not prevent association or have any other ill effect (apart from
generating more debug output).

This particular example is Extended Supported Rates IE (0x32 = 50) which
is used by IEEE 802.11g stations. In other words, you are likely to see
it with some implementations of IEEE 802.11g, but IEEE 802.11b-only STAs
won't send this IE.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA