Chenyuan Yang [off-list ref] wrote:

Dear Netlink Developers,

We are curious whether the function `netlink_proto_init()` might have a memory leak.

Yes, but

The function is https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.8/source/net/netlink/af_netlink.c#L2908
and the relevant code is

static int __init netlink_proto_init(void)
{
	int i;
  ...

	for (i = 0; i < MAX_LINKS; i++) {
		if (rhashtable_init(&nl_table[i].hash,
				    &netlink_rhashtable_params) < 0) {
			while (--i > 0)
				rhashtable_destroy(&nl_table[i].hash);
			kfree(nl_table);
			goto panic;

... this calls panic(), kernel will crash intentionally.

Perhaps best patch would be to remove this error handling
and panic straight away, this is pretty much dead code.