Linux DRM / Mesa memory leaks
James Turner <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.games.flightgear.devel |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Calling out this issue here, since it causes some pain, but I have no way on my setups to progress it. The reported issues are: https://gitlab.com/flightgear/flightgear/-/work_items/3366 (And some duplicates) The observed behaviour is that 2024.1 (and apparently maybe also 2020.3.x) leak memory continuously on *some* Linux setups, usually AMD-GPU based. At different times we have thought it was the kernel version which was significant, since some users report it on one machine but not others. (It’s likely `next` is not affected, because the rendering code changed so much, but this is unconfirmed) Recent reports have suggested it might be the Mesa version (25.x vs 26.x) which is significant, of course most people get their Mesa from the distro, so this would explain why dist-upgrades can cause or ‘fix’ the issue. And why Intel GPUs can also be affected, since they use Mesa. (Maybe also nVidia using Noveau?) I don’t believe there is a ‘bug’ in FlightGear, but there is likely an edge case in our use of OpenGL which we provoke in Mesa, that causes a leak. Of course we know there is no user-space leak when running with the nVidia binary driver, or on macOS or Windows. Ideally we would: - work out which Mesa versions are affected, so we can give some guidance to affected users in our README, etc (of course Mesa here could mean libDRM, the inter-relation of kernel / DRM / mesa versioning is not exactly clear to me as a non-Linux-person) - figure out a subset of FG which shows the leak (eg, turn off cockpit / clouds / terrain, does it still happen) - make a test case for the Mesa folks to fix, although if the issue is fixed in newer Mesa, they may not care. - profit. Or at least, have fewer frustrated Linux users. (But, even if we only achieved step #1, that would reduce user frustration a lot, since we could warn in the launcher based on the Mesa version) As ever, please follow up on the ticket. Kind regards, James _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel