I found a memory leak in iSCSI target that was caused by kref initialized to zero (the memory object was allocated with kzalloc, kref_init was not called and kref_put_spinlock_irqsave was called which changed "0" to "-1" and didn't free the object). Similar bugs may exist in other kernel areas, so I submit this patch that adds a check to kref.h. If the value is zero or negative, we can assume that it is uninitialized and we warn about it. Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@xxxxxxxxxx> --- include/linux/kref.h | 4 +++- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) Index: linux-3.15-rc5/include/linux/kref.h =================================================================== --- linux-3.15-rc5.orig/include/linux/kref.h 2014-05-16 19:00:18.000000000 +0200 +++ linux-3.15-rc5/include/linux/kref.h 2014-05-17 13:19:31.000000000 +0200 @@ -69,7 +69,7 @@ static inline int kref_sub(struct kref * void (*release)(struct kref *kref)) { WARN_ON(release == NULL); - + WARN_ON_ONCE(atomic_read(&kref->refcount) < (int)count); if (atomic_sub_and_test((int) count, &kref->refcount)) { release(kref); return 1; @@ -119,6 +119,7 @@ static inline int kref_put_spinlock_irqs unsigned long flags; WARN_ON(release == NULL); + WARN_ON_ONCE(atomic_read(&kref->refcount) <= 0); if (atomic_add_unless(&kref->refcount, -1, 1)) return 0; spin_lock_irqsave(lock, flags); @@ -136,6 +137,7 @@ static inline int kref_put_mutex(struct struct mutex *lock) { WARN_ON(release == NULL); + WARN_ON_ONCE(atomic_read(&kref->refcount) <= 0); if (unlikely(!atomic_add_unless(&kref->refcount, -1, 1))) { mutex_lock(lock); if (unlikely(!atomic_dec_and_test(&kref->refcount))) { -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html