mirror of
https://github.com/torvalds/linux
synced 2024-07-21 10:41:44 +00:00
9cc7e96aa8
Collect the time for each allocation recorded in page owner so that allocation "surges" can be measured. Record the pid for each allocation recorded in page owner so that the source of allocation "surges" can be better identified. The above is very useful when doing memory analysis. On a crash for example, we can get this information from kdump (or ramdump) and parse it to figure out memory allocation problems. Please note that on x86_64 this increases the size of struct page_owner from 16 bytes to 32. Vlastimil: it's not a functionality intended for production, so unless somebody says they need to enable page_owner for debugging and this increase prevents them from fitting into available memory, let's not complicate things with making this optional. [lmark@codeaurora.org: v3] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20201210160357.27779-1-georgi.djakov@linaro.org Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20201209125153.10533-1-georgi.djakov@linaro.org Signed-off-by: Liam Mark <lmark@codeaurora.org> Signed-off-by: Georgi Djakov <georgi.djakov@linaro.org> Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz> Acked-by: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com> Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
90 lines
3.7 KiB
ReStructuredText
90 lines
3.7 KiB
ReStructuredText
.. _page_owner:
|
|
|
|
==================================================
|
|
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 behaviour 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
|
|
48392 2333 644 51369 c8a9 mm/page_alloc.o
|
|
|
|
- With page owner::
|
|
|
|
text data bss dec hex filename
|
|
48800 2445 644 51889 cab1 mm/page_alloc.o
|
|
6574 108 29 6711 1a37 mm/page_owner.o
|
|
1025 8 8 1041 411 mm/page_ext.o
|
|
|
|
Although, roughly, 8 KB code is added in total, page_alloc.o increase by
|
|
520 bytes and less than 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
|
|
./page_owner_sort page_owner_full.txt sorted_page_owner.txt
|
|
|
|
See the result about who allocated each page
|
|
in the ``sorted_page_owner.txt``.
|