#1110495 mame-tools: Possible chdman memory leak

Package:
mame-tools
Source:
mame-tools
Description:
Tools for MAME
Submitter:
Nacho
Date:
2025-08-07 00:15:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1110495#5
Date:
2025-08-07 00:13:17 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

Upon running chdman (part of the tools included in the package mame-tools) to compress an ISO file to CHD, memory usage increases until it fills both physical and swap memory, rendering the system unusable until the OOM killer stops the process before it finishes and makes the resulting file useless.

The command used is chdman createdvd -i 'name_of_iso.iso' -o 'name_of_iso.chd' and it should not use more than a few GB's of memory to finish the process. It seems to happen with every single ISO file I've tried no matter the size, but on smaller files the process at least completes before the system runs out of memory, resulting in a compressed and usable CHD file.

I have not yet tried any of the other functions of the chdman package, but I have tried older and newer versions of chdman on other systems and have never experienced this problem. (I have not found any mention of a memory leak 'fix' in the last releases upstream)