Comment 38 for bug 565981

Peter Velkovski,

Thanks for the suggestion, but on my system - even if I close all applications on the running X server - the GEM "object bytes" value *never* decreases. Freeing the pagecache, dentries and inodes (as you suggest) makes no difference at any point.

The only way to reduce the ever-increasing GEM allocation is to restart the running X server. At the conclusion of all my tests (comments #33-36), I always stopped GDM, switched to a VT, and checked the values in /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/gem_objects. With no X server running, the object bytes allocation is usually reduced to ~30MB.

Let me also clarify something: In comments #33-36, I neglected to mention that by "patched X server", I was referring to version 2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7~xup2 from the X-Updates PPA.

I have subsequently tried to test version 2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7.5 from https://edge.launchpad.net/~sarvatt/+archive/bugs and noted the following:

GDM starts up and I can enter my login credentials, but I get stuck at the purple wallpaper with no other graphical elements loading. The pointer is responsive and I can switch to a VT (which I do). At this point I check the kernel and Xorg.0.log, but see no errors or useful output from the tail sections. When I try to switch from the VT back to the running server, my system freezes and I am forced to power cycle the system.

It seems to me that the 2ubuntu7.5 packaged with the backported fixes has the bigger potential for regressions. As for my particular system, I guess that my last recourse it to test a vanilla 1.8 server to see if that fixes the memory leak.