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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/vm/page_owner.txt')
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diff --git a/Documentation/vm/page_owner.txt b/Documentation/vm/page_owner.txt deleted file mode 100644 index ffff1439076a5..0000000000000 --- a/Documentation/vm/page_owner.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,82 +0,0 @@ -page owner: Tracking about who allocated each page ------------------------------------------------------------ - -* Introduction - -page owner is for the tracking about who allocated each page. -It can be used to debug memory leak or to find a memory hogger. -When allocation happens, information about allocation such as call stack -and order of pages is stored into certain storage for each page. -When we need to know about status of all pages, we can get and analyze -this information. - -Although we already have tracepoint for tracing page allocation/free, -using it for analyzing who allocate each page is rather complex. We need -to enlarge the trace buffer for preventing overlapping until userspace -program launched. And, launched program continually dump out the trace -buffer for later analysis and it would change system behviour with more -possibility rather than just keeping it in memory, so bad for debugging. - -page owner can also be used for various purposes. For example, accurate -fragmentation statistics can be obtained through gfp flag information of -each page. It is already implemented and activated if page owner is -enabled. Other usages are more than welcome. - -page owner is disabled in default. So, if you'd like to use it, you need -to add "page_owner=on" into your boot cmdline. If the kernel is built -with page owner and page owner is disabled in runtime due to no enabling -boot option, runtime overhead is marginal. If disabled in runtime, it -doesn't require memory to store owner information, so there is no runtime -memory overhead. And, page owner inserts just two unlikely branches into -the page allocator hotpath and if not enabled, then allocation is done -like as the kernel without page owner. These two unlikely branches should -not affect to allocation performance, especially if the static keys jump -label patching functionality is available. Following is the kernel's code -size change due to this facility. - -- Without page owner - text data bss dec hex filename - 40662 1493 644 42799 a72f mm/page_alloc.o - -- With page owner - text data bss dec hex filename - 40892 1493 644 43029 a815 mm/page_alloc.o - 1427 24 8 1459 5b3 mm/page_ext.o - 2722 50 0 2772 ad4 mm/page_owner.o - -Although, roughly, 4 KB code is added in total, page_alloc.o increase by -230 bytes and only half of it is in hotpath. Building the kernel with -page owner and turning it on if needed would be great option to debug -kernel memory problem. - -There is one notice that is caused by implementation detail. page owner -stores information into the memory from struct page extension. This memory -is initialized some time later than that page allocator starts in sparse -memory system, so, until initialization, many pages can be allocated and -they would have no owner information. To fix it up, these early allocated -pages are investigated and marked as allocated in initialization phase. -Although it doesn't mean that they have the right owner information, -at least, we can tell whether the page is allocated or not, -more accurately. On 2GB memory x86-64 VM box, 13343 early allocated pages -are catched and marked, although they are mostly allocated from struct -page extension feature. Anyway, after that, no page is left in -un-tracking state. - -* Usage - -1) Build user-space helper - cd tools/vm - make page_owner_sort - -2) Enable page owner - Add "page_owner=on" to boot cmdline. - -3) Do the job what you want to debug - -4) Analyze information from page owner - cat /sys/kernel/debug/page_owner > page_owner_full.txt - grep -v ^PFN page_owner_full.txt > page_owner.txt - ./page_owner_sort page_owner.txt sorted_page_owner.txt - - See the result about who allocated each page - in the sorted_page_owner.txt. |