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@luohoufu luohoufu released this 11 Jan 14:29
· 9 commits to main since this release
17da138
Fix memory leak when pruning scrollback with non-standard pages (#10251)

This _finally_ resolves #9962 (and the myriad of dupes). 

The core issue was that when a non-standard size page is reused as part
of our scrollback pruning, it was resized to be standard size, which
caused our future frees to believe it was pooled and not call `munmap`
properly.

The solution I chose was to never reuse non-standard sized pages. If
during scrollback pruning we detect a non-standard page, we destroy it
and re-alloc. This frees the old memory and reuses pool memory for the
new page.

As part of this, I also introduced a custom page allocator that uses
macOS's mach kernel virtual memory tagging feature to specifically tag
our PageList memory. I was able to use this in conjunction with
Instruments and `footprint` to verify that our PageList memory was
previously not freed and is now successfully freed.

**No AI was used in my work here.** AI was used by others in their
analysis of this issue that I used the results of to help guide me and
give me other things to consider, but the ultimate understanding and fix
was all done via my own meat sticks.

## Detailed Explainer

Ghostty uses a memory pool of fixed-size `mmap`-ed pages to serve as the
backing memory for our terminal. If the terminal requires a non-standard
(larger) amount of memory due to an abundance of emoji, styles,
hyperlinks, etc. then we allocate non-pooled pages directly with `mmap`.
When freeing our pages, if it is `<= standard size` we just put it back
into the memory pool. If it is larger, we `munmap` it.

This explains and defines both a _standard_ and therefore _non-standard_
page.

Ghostty also has the concept of a "scrollback limit" (exposed to the
user via the `scrollback-limit` config). This caps the size of our
scrollback or history. When we reach this limit, we have a trick that we
do: to avoid allocation, we reuse the oldest page in the history.

Unfortunately, as part of this process, we were resizing the underlying
memory to be standard size again. This was causing our future frees to
believe this was pooled memory, and never unmap it. This was the main
source of the leak.

## Thanks

Big shout out to @grishy for being the person that finally got me a
reproduction so I could analyze the issue for myself. His own analysis
got to the same conclusion as me but thanks to the reproduction I was
able to verify both our understandings independently.