I have found a situation that can lead to a big memory leak with the
openafs modules on Linux, until all RAM is exhausted and the machine
start to trash memory and swap, until death.  It's a known problem?

I have mounted the volume root.afs inside a directory, 
"fs mkmount -dir /afs/cell/dir/new_cells -vol root.afs" , 
so I could create a mount point for the root.afs of a foreign cell.  
But I forget to destroy it in the end, "fs rmmount /afs/cell/dir/new_cells".

When my backup system started, amanda using gnu tar, to backup my
cell of afs, it backed up /afs/cell/dir/new_cells by mistake.  The
kernel in the machine that ran tar on the /afs/cell/dir/new_cells
directory, started to eat all the available memory.  If I reboot or
stop openafs client, everything is OK.  All the memory is reclaimed by
the kernel to be used by the normal programs.  I don't have privileges
to backup the foreign cell, only my local cell.

After doing "fs rmmount /afs/cell/dir/new_cells" everything went
OK, and the backups run as usually, without memory leaks.

Output of important commands with the memory leak.

Free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1035572    1026832       8740          0        816       7480
-/+ buffers/cache:    1018536      17036
Swap:     11719396      27472   11691924

vmstat -m
Cache                       Num  Total   Size  Pages
size-1024(DMA)                0      0   1024      4
size-1024                869512 869512   1024      4
size-512(DMA)                 0      0    512      8
size-64                  219543 219657     64     59
size-32                   24615  25312     32    113

I know the mix of versions of openafs software I use in my servers and
clients is not perfect, but have worked until now without problems.
Here is the list.

kernel
Linux 2.6.16

openafs modules:
1.4.1 and 1.4.0 - from Debian recompiled to work with Debian stable

openafs clients:
1.3.81-3sarge1

openafs servers:
1.3.81-3sarge1
1.2.11


    José Calhariz

-- 
A modestia é uma das minhas inumeras virtudes.

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