hal-set-property irreversibly of consolekit daemon

[Michael Lashkevich]

Recently I found that each execution of the command "hal-set-property" irreversibly increases memory usage of the consolekit daemon.

The matter is that I experienced some a problem with correct battery level detection on the OpenSUSE 10.3 with the kernel 2.6.30 (which is necessary to support my hardware). I bypassed this problem by writing a script that work as a daemon and resets the battery hal properties every 3 seconds according to "/sys" data using the "hal-set-property" command. Since usually I never reboot my computer but only hibernate it, deamons normally work for hundreds of hours without restarting. After some time I noticed that consolekit daemon becomes the most memory expensive process on my computer, which sometimes causes freezing. Then I checked that this memory leakage is caused by repeated execution of the "hal-set-property" command.

Again, I bypassed the problem in my script by resetting the properties only if their values changed (using "hal-get-property" which does not affect the memory of the consolekit daemon). It saved much of memory while I am working with the AC adaptor when these properties are constant, but the problem still exists: hal-set-property adds some amount of resident memory to the console-kit-daemon every time it is executed.

Michael Lashkevich