I have been able to consistently reproduce the bug again, and have run QEMU with Valgrind until OOM. It is unrelated to networking; it is caused by loading a config file.
I ran QEMU from Git commit 7f6613cedc59fa849105668ae971dc31004bca1c under valgrind via... valgrind qemu-system-x86_64 -readconfig windows8_throwaway_VM.conf -m 1G -vga std 2>&1 | tee valgrind.log ...where the contents of windows8_throwaway_VM.conf is... [drive] file = "windows8_throwaway_HDD.img" index = "0" media = "disk" if = "virtio" [net] type = "nic" vlan = "0" model = "virtio" [net] type = "user" vlan = "0" [rtc] base = "localtime" [machine] accel = "kvm" (I will attach the file in a separate comment, because launchpad appears to only allow at most one attachment per comment.) It does not seem to matter whether VirtIO is used, as I have had this problem when not using any VirtIO devices, but the Windows guest I had on-hand was already using it. If I invoke QEMU with the equivalent settings all via the command line, it does not gobble memory (again, regardless of VirtIO). qemu-system-x86_64 -drive file=windows8_throwaway_HDD.img,index=0,media=disk,if=virtio -enable-kvm -m 1G -vga std -net nic,vlan=0,model=virtio -net user,vlan=0 -rtc localtime ** Attachment added: "valgrind.log" https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1288620/+attachment/4049961/+files/valgrind.log -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1288620 Title: memory leak with config file Status in QEMU: New Bug description: I have a Windows 7 SP1 Professional 64-bit installation on a QCOW2 image with compat=1.1, which I launch via qemu-system-x86_64 -drive file=windows_base_HDD.img,index=0,media=disk -enable-kvm -m 512M -vga std -net nic,vlan=0 -net user,vlan=0 As soon as I start using the network in any application — for example, visiting www.google.com in Internet Explorer — QEMU starts gobbling memory until the (host) kernel kills it because of an OOM condition. If I run the QEMU with the same options, but with model=e1000 option set for the NIC (i.e. -net -nic,vlan=0,model=e1000), I can use the network from the guest OS without any noticeable effect on QEMU's memory consumption. I do not have this problem when running QEMU with the exact same options (as above, without model=e1000) but with a Debian wheezy installation (on a QCOW image of the same format). My host system in Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64, kernel image 3.11.0-17-generic, but with the QEMU packages from trusty (the codename for the next release): Output of `dpkg -l \*qemu\* | grep '^ii'`: ii ipxe-qemu 1.0.0+git-20130710.936134e-0ubuntu1 all Virtual package to support use of kvm-ipxe with qemu ii qemu-keymaps 1.7.0+dfsg-3ubuntu2 all QEMU keyboard maps ii qemu-system-common 1.7.0+dfsg-3ubuntu2 amd64 QEMU full system emulation binaries (common files) ii qemu-system-x86 1.7.0+dfsg-3ubuntu2 amd64 QEMU full system emulation binaries (x86) ii qemu-utils 1.7.0+dfsg-3ubuntu2 amd64 QEMU utilities (If necessary, I can try to reproduce this with QEMU built from the upstream source or the latest source from version control.) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1288620/+subscriptions
