Memory leak with open / close on lpuart (VF50 / linux)

We have a memory leak in the kernel of about 500 bytes per cycle if we open and close a lpuart on the Colibri VF50 board.
Our hardware has also additional uarts on a expansion board connected with SPI (SC16IS752 chip based).
We don’t have the effect for the uarts on the expansion board.

Here is my test code :

int main()
{
	const char path[] = "/dev/ttyLP2";
	int i;
	int fd;
	int status;

	for (i = 0; i < 10000; ++i) {
    	if (i % 100 == 0)
			printf("%d\n", i);
        fd = open(path, O_RDWR | O_NOCTTY | O_NDELAY | O_EXCL);
        if (fd == -1) {
            printf("cannot open %s\n", path);
			return 1;
		}
        status = close(fd);
        if (status != 0)
        	printf("error on close : %s\n", strerror(errno));
    }
	return 0;
}

# uname -a
Linux EGV50 4.4.88 #5 PREEMPT Wed Jan 10 14:30:22 CET 2018 armv7l GNU/Linux
# cat /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal:         120808 kB
MemFree:           84196 kB
MemAvailable:      99676 kB
Buffers:               0 kB
Cached:            17880 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:            13856 kB
Inactive:           9416 kB
Active(anon):       5432 kB
Inactive(anon):      420 kB
Active(file):       8424 kB
Inactive(file):     8996 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:             0 kB
SwapFree:              0 kB
Dirty:                 4 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:          5420 kB
Mapped:            11664 kB
Shmem:               456 kB
Slab:               8324 kB
SReclaimable:       2548 kB
SUnreclaim:         5776 kB
KernelStack:         496 kB
PageTables:          400 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:       60404 kB
Committed_AS:     117080 kB
VmallocTotal:    1957888 kB
VmallocUsed:           0 kB
VmallocChunk:          0 kB
CmaTotal:          16384 kB
CmaFree:           16008 kB
# ./Test 
0
100
200
300
400
500
...
9300
9400
9500
9600
9700
9800
9900
# cat /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal:         120808 kB
MemFree:           77952 kB
MemAvailable:      93444 kB
Buffers:               0 kB
Cached:            17888 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:            13932 kB
Inactive:           9352 kB
Active(anon):       5432 kB
Inactive(anon):      420 kB
Active(file):       8500 kB
Inactive(file):     8932 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:             0 kB
SwapFree:              0 kB
Dirty:                 4 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:          5420 kB
Mapped:            11672 kB
Shmem:               456 kB
Slab:              13408 kB
SReclaimable:       2552 kB
SUnreclaim:        10856 kB
KernelStack:         480 kB
PageTables:          400 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:       60404 kB
Committed_AS:     117080 kB
VmallocTotal:    1957888 kB
VmallocUsed:           0 kB
VmallocChunk:          0 kB
CmaTotal:          16384 kB
CmaFree:           16008 kB

My program open and close the device /dev/ttyLP2 10’000 time and then exits.
After it, MemAvailable has lost 6232 kB (99676 → 93444), and SUnreclaim is 5080 kB bigger.
If i’m not wrong, SUnreclaim are memory blocs allocated with something like kmalloc and not freed.

Best regards,
Patrick Gerber

On first glance I cannot see what would explain such a leak. We need more time to investigate the issue. I suspect it could be a issue with the DMA code path, can you check without DMA by using one of the two methods documented here: