[LTP] [PATCH v2] perf_event_open03: Track SUnreclaim growth instead of MemAvailable

Tang Yizhou via ltp <[email protected]> Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:41:25 +0800
Newsgroups it.linux.lists.ltp
Message-ID <[email protected]>
From: Tang Yizhou <[email protected]>

CVE-2020-25704 leaks a small kmalloc() allocation (the filter's file
name string) on every failed PERF_EVENT_IOC_SET_FILTER call. The test
detected this by watching MemAvailable in /proc/meminfo drop by more
than 100MB over 12M iterations.

MemAvailable is a global, system-wide estimate. It is heavily influenced
by other memory activities of unrelated processes. This produces
intermittent false positives: the test passes when run alone but
occasionally fails when run with other tasks.

An improvement is to track the growth of SUnreclaim instead. It is less
sensitive to other kinds of memory activities.

Also note in the failure output that unreclaimable slab can still grow
due to unrelated slab activities, so a failure should be confirmed on an
idle system or with kmemleak before being treated as a regression.

Reviewed-by: Vlastimil Babka (SUSE) <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Cyril Hrubis <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Tang Yizhou <[email protected]>
---
v2:
Take Vlastimil and Cyril's reviewed-by tag.
Update the printed error message.

 .../perf_event_open/perf_event_open03.c       | 30 +++++++++++--------
 1 file changed, 18 insertions(+), 12 deletions(-)

diff --git a/testcases/kernel/syscalls/perf_event_open/perf_event_open03.c b/testcases/kernel/syscalls/perf_event_open/perf_event_open03.c
index 389cc35111b4..a4ce6eaffc02 100644
--- a/testcases/kernel/syscalls/perf_event_open/perf_event_open03.c
+++ b/testcases/kernel/syscalls/perf_event_open/perf_event_open03.c
@@ -77,13 +77,13 @@ static void check_progress(int i)
 
 static void run(void)
 {
-	long diff, diff_total, mem_avail, mem_avail_prev;
+	long diff, diff_total, slab, slab_prev;
 	int i, sample;
 
 	sample = 0;
 	diff_total = 0;
 
-	mem_avail_prev = SAFE_READ_MEMINFO("MemAvailable:");
+	slab_prev = SAFE_READ_MEMINFO("SUnreclaim:");
 	tst_timer_start(CLOCK_MONOTONIC);
 
 	/* leak about 100MB of RAM */
@@ -92,28 +92,34 @@ static void run(void)
 		check_progress(i);
 
 		/*
-		 * Every 1200000 iterations, calculate the difference in memory
-		 * availability. If the difference is greater than 20 * 1024 (20MB),
-		 * increment the sample counter and log the event.
+		 * Every 1200000 iterations, calculate how much the unreclaimable
+		 * slab has grown. If the increase is greater than 20 * 1024
+		 * (20MB), increment the sample counter and log the event.
 		 */
 		if ((i % 1200000) == 0) {
-			mem_avail = SAFE_READ_MEMINFO("MemAvailable:");
-			diff = mem_avail_prev - mem_avail;
+			slab = SAFE_READ_MEMINFO("SUnreclaim:");
+			diff = slab - slab_prev;
 			diff_total += diff;
 
 			if (diff > 20 * 1024) {
 				sample++;
-				tst_res(TINFO, "MemAvailable decreased by %ld kB at iteration %d", diff, i);
+				tst_res(TINFO, "SUnreclaim increased by %ld kB at iteration %d", diff, i);
 			}
 
-			mem_avail_prev = mem_avail;
+			slab_prev = slab;
 		}
 	}
 
-	if ((sample > 5) || (diff_total > 100 * 1024))
-		tst_res(TFAIL, "Likely kernel memory leak detected, total decrease: %ld kB", diff_total);
-	else
+	if ((sample > 5) || (diff_total > 100 * 1024)) {
+		tst_res(TFAIL,
+			"Likely kernel memory leak detected, SUnreclaim increased by %ld kB total",
+			diff_total);
+		tst_res(TINFO,
+			"Unreclaimable slab can also grow due to unrelated reasons as well. "
+			"You can rerun the test with CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK to make sure the leak is real");
+	} else {
 		tst_res(TPASS, "No memory leak found");
+	}
 }
 
 static void cleanup(void)
-- 
2.43.0


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