06 June 2009

The case of the driver leaking handles - Marvell Yukon Service

I noticed that one of my process, rundll32, was leaking handles thanks to Process Explorer, a sysinternal tool. Rundll32 is a Windows hosting process, so it's the process hosted inside that is leaking. Hopefully Process explorer says who is behind by just overlaping the cursor:
So the hosted service is Marvell Yukon Service (yksvc), used by my network card. To find what sort of handle is leaking, i added the lower pane inside Process explorer by pressing crtl +L. Scrolling down, i found a lot of mutant, always on the same object, \BaseNameObjects\NetCfgWriteLock. All new handle are highlighted in green, so i found out that it keeps opening a new handle every second or so:
A right click allows to get its property:
As Mark always recommend, i checked my driver version, which is a bit old:
A newer version is available on the Marvell support page, so i decided to give it a try.
Before doing the driver update, i used perfmon on my system to check the handle behavior before and after the upgrade. It confirmed that the bug is now resolved:
Thanks to mark tools & tutorial, this problem is gone :)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Mathieu, thanks for this useful troubleshooting guide.

There is a slight error in the URL at Marvel for finding network card drivers, it should be "http://www.marvell.com/drivers/search.do".

James.