Post

My kernel was doing some really weird stuff recently, where something (in the kernel?) is allocating a ton of memory that isn't really accounted for anywhere (not in slab, not anywhere userspace (processes add up to 4GiB total), just kinda there Rolling back to older LTS kernel seems to fix things

This has started recently, and looking at my kernel update history, 6.10.10 is fine, 6.11.6 was probably fine too, but 6.11.9 was definitely not. 6.11.8 iirc had this problem too. Now, the main two drives that allocate user pages that I suspect are NVIDIA and i40e (inter networking)

Likely related is that the burst of allocated memory in the first post happened after a large download, and also my network card is throwing a ton of AER errors for some reason (probably need to re-seat the CPU, tried other things) - but those errors were there for over a year now

There is only one way to proceed: write a reproducer and start bisecting