Huge memory leaks after upgrading from kernel 2.6.38(?)

Question

My system began leaking memory some months ago and I've little to no idea what is causing it. The closest hint I can give is that I think these problems started around upgrading from Linux 2.6.38 to 2.6.39 and have continued with 3.0 aswell. Sometimes my whole system freezes due to extensive swapping (HDD usage led stays lit), sometimes it stops after consuming almost all of my 4 GB RAM.
I think the leak has to come from inside the kernel because all sysmon apps claim no application is eating too much RAM yet the system memory consumption is at 100 % or even using swap. Even after I kill Xorg the memory usage will stay at least at 2.0 GB, when it should be less than half a gig.
I'd like to guess the blame is on Nouveau, because it was giving me a hell of a time back with Linux 2.6.39. It had a habit of freezing my system when re-enabling suspended compositing (both with Kwin and Mutter). Also video playback was corrupted sometimes. These probs have since been fixed with Linux 3.0.
I cannot name any spesific app that might trigger this memory leaking. I don't play any games and mainly use Firefox, Chromium and VLC day in, day out.
There seems to be absolutely no way of reclaiming the reserved memory than rebooting the whole system. I have even tried unloading Nouveau.
I am currently running the [testing] repo with ~daily upgrades.
Last edited by Verge (2011-08-16 14:04:09)

Answer 1

OK, this kind of surprised me. No wonder I couldn't find any relevant stuff while googling for kernel issues. I have had Strigi disabled for some time now because it is miserably broken, but I now disabled the whole Nepomuk too. Let's see if my problem now goes away or what...
The release of KDE 4.7 Beta 1 actually lines up with the launch of Linux 2.6.39 so this really might be the case. I moved to KDE 4.7 already with the first beta.
Last edited by Verge (2011-08-16 14:30:37)