[Nexus 10 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] bigmatty:
Hi everyone, I'm not sure how useful this thread will be - but I hope it will be useful. As I've watched new N10 users come into the fold of finding and wanting to learn more about "the reboot problem" I realize the information on this topic is spread all over the place. I've tried to gather the information, as well as present it in a good fashion, such that there is a link/thread that can be easily referenced. I'm not the most technical of this crowd (I mean c'mon I am here at XDA!) so please forgive me and notify me of any needed corrections or clarifications.

---[Documenting] Google's Nexus 10 MALI GPU memory leak *UNRESOLVED*---

The Nexus 10, henceforth N10, is an Android tablet made by Samsung for Google. At launch in November 2012 the N10 was shipped with Android 4.2.0

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Included in the N10 is a SOC (system-on-a-chip) from the Exynos line:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos_(system_on_chip)

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The Exynos uses a GPU made by ARM. The GPU component is the ARM Mali-T604.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_(GPU)

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Starting immediately after the N10’s launch there were reports of “random reboots”. At first not much was known about the exact cause of these reboots. The audience participating in these reports experienced varying degrees of testing results, especially as 4.2.1 and 4.2.2 updates rolled out. The majority of this discussion is captured in two threads:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/mobile/VFYnt7uN9d0[1-25-false] *

and

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1998496

(*Note that the Google thread was erroneously marked ‘Answered’ after one of the OTA roll outs.)

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The community was able to flush out that the memory/RSS use of Android’s surfaceflinger process seemed to be the victim of a memory leak, and that by monitoring the RSS value one could predict when the tablet would experience the degraded performance. Viktor.M then created this open issue report that focuses in on that:

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=54757

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About that time a user named apstrand, who appears to either be an ARM developer or at the very least someone who is extremely knowledgeable in this area had found more exact and detailed info on this, and he posted it here:

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=52579

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Matthew Fry began contacting Samsung, then in turn ARM, as he posted in one of the Google threads. Eventually he was able to get this response: "I can confirm that we were able to reproduce the issue in the stock Nexus 10 4.2.2 provided by Google. We were, however, unable to reproduce it with our release driver.

We will test the application again when the next release of the firmware for Nexus 10 is published."

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From this point, knowing ARM has code that avoids the error, people began looking into working on the code themselves, and asking ARM for assistance. ARM has posted source code components for the T-6xx series of drivers here:

http://malideveloper.arm.com/develo...n-source-mali-t6xx-gpu-kernel-device-drivers/

However ARM has also stated, “these components are not a complete driver stack. To build a functional OpenGL ES you need access to the full source code of the Mali GPU DDK, which is provided under the standard ARM commercial licence to all Mali GPU customers.” This means Samsung has an ARM DDK (Driver Development Kit), but to date has not released it/aspects of it to the public.

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For now there appears nothing anyone can do without access to the ARM DDK.

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EDIT/UPDATE: Since my original post here, a lot of activity happened in a short period of time. Many comments below capture this. I will add the history into this thread, but the big news is 4.3 is out for the N10 now and the community is testing. Like each time a new Android version has rolled out, community testing is "all over the place" with different people reporting different results. People who know how to measure the exact parameters on this bug are reporting it looks like it may be fixed! Its noteworthy though that there is some suspicion of other issues. Because I want to keep this first post based only on facts, I am going to wait a while and see the community results before posting an update that cant be backed up by actual data.

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FINAL UPDATE: Ok, looks like its fixed now. I'm not saying they didn't morph it somehow to another issue, but I am saying the exact situation we were all focused on here is no longer going on w/ the 4.3 (4.3.x if you want to include the 3mb update.)