12:27 p.m.
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Lars Knipschild <laknipschild(a)uni-osnabrueck.de>
Date: Mon, Jan 5, 2026 at 10:34 AM
Subject: Memory-Leak in nfs-ganesha
To: <nfs-ganesha-maintainers(a)fedoraproject.org>
Dear libntirpc-maintainers,
thanks a lot for maintaining this package!
We use CEPH+Ganesha (5.9-1 from CentOS Storage Sig)+HAProxy
(Proxy-Protocol).
With this setup we observed unusual growth of memory usage in ganesha.nfsd.
We traced this issue back a memory leak in
nfs4_op_getxattr (src/Protocols/NFS/nfs4_op_xattr.c, line 83):
gxr_value.utf8string_val = gsh_malloc(gxr_value.utf8string_len + 1);
This block of 1025 bytes is only freed if the function succeeds. In our
case (libceph) the function call
obj_handle->obj_ops->getxattrs (line 98) returns an error ( -61
(-ENODATA)) if there are no xattrs for the respective file.
Some client activity (gocryptfs+rsync) caused lots of getxattrs-calls
leading to ~40MB/min memory-growth.
To solve the problem I prepared the following patch, that we tested
during December:
[lars@vmwnh SOURCES]$ cat ganesha_xattr_memleak.patch
diff -Naru nfs-ganesha-5.9_orig/src/Protocols/NFS/nfs4_op_xattr.c
nfs-ganesha-5.9/src/Protocols/NFS/nfs4_op_xattr.c
--- nfs-ganesha-5.9_orig/src/Protocols/NFS/nfs4_op_xattr.c 2025-12-08
14:36:49.778825846 +0100
+++ nfs-ganesha-5.9/src/Protocols/NFS/nfs4_op_xattr.c 2025-12-08
14:51:43.666539343 +0100
@@ -79,9 +79,6 @@
res_GETXATTR4->GETXATTR4res_u.resok4.gxr_value.utf8string_len = 0;
res_GETXATTR4->GETXATTR4res_u.resok4.gxr_value.utf8string_val = NULL;
- gxr_value.utf8string_len = XATTR_VALUE_SIZE;
- gxr_value.utf8string_val = gsh_malloc(gxr_value.utf8string_len + 1);
-
/* Do basic checks on a filehandle */
res_GETXATTR4->status = nfs4_sanity_check_FH(data, NO_FILE_TYPE,
false);
@@ -95,16 +92,19 @@
return NFS_REQ_ERROR;
}
+ gxr_value.utf8string_len = XATTR_VALUE_SIZE;
+ gxr_value.utf8string_val = gsh_malloc(gxr_value.utf8string_len + 1);
+
fsal_status = obj_handle->obj_ops->getxattrs(obj_handle,
&arg_GETXATTR4->gxa_name,
&gxr_value);
if (FSAL_IS_ERROR(fsal_status)) {
+ gsh_free(gxr_value.utf8string_val);
if (fsal_status.major == ERR_FSAL_XATTR2BIG) {
LogDebug(COMPONENT_NFS_V4,
"FSAL buffer len %d too small",
XATTR_VALUE_SIZE);
/* Get size of xattr value */
- gsh_free(gxr_value.utf8string_val);
gxr_value.utf8string_len = 0;
gxr_value.utf8string_val = NULL;
fsal_status = obj_handle->obj_ops->getxattrs(obj_handle,
@@ -128,6 +128,7 @@
&gxr_value);
if (FSAL_IS_ERROR(fsal_status)) {
+ gsh_free(gxr_value.utf8string_val);
res_GETXATTR4->status = nfs4_Errno_state(
state_error_convert(fsal_status));
return NFS_REQ_ERROR;
This patch is quite similar to
https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha/commit/c8c6b8d8c03ac746c7d7e96...
.
Have a nice day!
Best
Lars
--
Dr. Lars Knipschild | Universität Osnabrück - Rechenzentrum |
High-Performance-Computing Koordinator | lars(a)uos.de | 0541 969 2316
--
Kaleb