Memory leak in the libertas driver ?

Cyril HAENEL chaenel at free.fr
Fri Apr 3 09:00:31 EDT 2009


Hi all,

I use a wifi card based on a 8385 chip on a home built board (blackfin 
537 and uclinux based), everything works well, but to have a lower power 
cunsumption, I disconnect the card when I don't need the wiki link. I 
don't physically disconnect the wifi card, in fact I set the reset 
signal of the pcmcia socket and its power consumption is close to 0.

When I need to save power I do :

- ifconfig eth0 down (to stop eth0)
- pccardctl eject (needed to be able to unload libertas modules)
- rmmod libertas_cs
- rmmod libertas
- Reset signal of the pcmcia socket set to 1.

When I need the wifi link I do :

- Reset signal of the pcmcia socket set to 0
- pccardctl insert (in syslog a message tell me a new pcmcia device is 
inserted)
- insmod libertas.ko
- insmod libertas_cs.ko
- Load firmwares (at the end of the process the mac address is displayed)
- ifconfig eth0 up
- etc...

It works well but after some unload/reload cycles the board freezes, and 
there is no free memory. I think there is a memory leak somewhere in 
libertas_cs.ko, because :

- Multiple ifconfig eth0 down / ifconfig eth0 up doesn't cause a growing 
memory usage
- Multiple ifconfig eth0 down + pccardctl eject / pccardctl insert + 
ifconfig eth0 up doesn't cause a growing memory usage
- Multiple ifconfig eth0 down + pccardctl eject + rmmod libertas / 
pccardctl insert + insmod libertas.ko + ifconfig eth0 up doesn't cause a 
growing memory usage

But in the last configuration, when libertas_cs.ko is unload / load, I 
have memory leak and a growing memory usage.

I don't use the last driver version, but anyone knows if a memory 
leakage bug was found these last months in the driver ?

Regards,
Cyril HAENEL

-- 

Cyril Haenel
Registered Linux User #332632




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