14 Dec, 2014

3 commits

  • This is the page owner tracking code which is introduced so far ago. It
    is resident on Andrew's tree, though, nobody tried to upstream so it
    remain as is. Our company uses this feature actively to debug memory leak
    or to find a memory hogger so I decide to upstream this feature.

    This functionality help us to know who allocates the page. When
    allocating a page, we store some information about allocation in extra
    memory. Later, if we need to know status of all pages, we can get and
    analyze it from this stored information.

    In previous version of this feature, extra memory is statically defined in
    struct page, but, in this version, extra memory is allocated outside of
    struct page. It enables us to turn on/off this feature at boottime
    without considerable memory waste.

    Although we already have tracepoint for tracing page allocation/free,
    using it to analyze page owner 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 debug.

    Moreover, we can use page_owner feature further for various purposes. For
    example, we can use it for fragmentation statistics implemented in this
    patch. And, I also plan to implement some CMA failure debugging feature
    using this interface.

    I'd like to give the credit for all developers contributed this feature,
    but, it's not easy because I don't know exact history. Sorry about that.
    Below is people who has "Signed-off-by" in the patches in Andrew's tree.

    Contributor:
    Alexander Nyberg
    Mel Gorman
    Dave Hansen
    Minchan Kim
    Michal Nazarewicz
    Andrew Morton
    Jungsoo Son

    Signed-off-by: Joonsoo Kim
    Cc: Mel Gorman
    Cc: Johannes Weiner
    Cc: Minchan Kim
    Cc: Dave Hansen
    Cc: Michal Nazarewicz
    Cc: Jungsoo Son
    Cc: Ingo Molnar
    Cc: Joonsoo Kim
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Joonsoo Kim
     
  • Until now, debug-pagealloc needs extra flags in struct page, so we need to
    recompile whole source code when we decide to use it. This is really
    painful, because it takes some time to recompile and sometimes rebuild is
    not possible due to third party module depending on struct page. So, we
    can't use this good feature in many cases.

    Now, we have the page extension feature that allows us to insert extra
    flags to outside of struct page. This gets rid of third party module
    issue mentioned above. And, this allows us to determine if we need extra
    memory for this page extension in boottime. With these property, we can
    avoid using debug-pagealloc in boottime with low computational overhead in
    the kernel built with CONFIG_DEBUG_PAGEALLOC. This will help our
    development process greatly.

    This patch is the preparation step to achive above goal. debug-pagealloc
    originally uses extra field of struct page, but, after this patch, it will
    use field of struct page_ext. Because memory for page_ext is allocated
    later than initialization of page allocator in CONFIG_SPARSEMEM, we should
    disable debug-pagealloc feature temporarily until initialization of
    page_ext. This patch implements this.

    Signed-off-by: Joonsoo Kim
    Cc: Mel Gorman
    Cc: Johannes Weiner
    Cc: Minchan Kim
    Cc: Dave Hansen
    Cc: Michal Nazarewicz
    Cc: Jungsoo Son
    Cc: Ingo Molnar
    Cc: Joonsoo Kim
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Joonsoo Kim
     
  • When we debug something, we'd like to insert some information to every
    page. For this purpose, we sometimes modify struct page itself. But,
    this has drawbacks. First, it requires re-compile. This makes us
    hesitate to use the powerful debug feature so development process is
    slowed down. And, second, sometimes it is impossible to rebuild the
    kernel due to third party module dependency. At third, system behaviour
    would be largely different after re-compile, because it changes size of
    struct page greatly and this structure is accessed by every part of
    kernel. Keeping this as it is would be better to reproduce errornous
    situation.

    This feature is intended to overcome above mentioned problems. This
    feature allocates memory for extended data per page in certain place
    rather than the struct page itself. This memory can be accessed by the
    accessor functions provided by this code. During the boot process, it
    checks whether allocation of huge chunk of memory is needed or not. If
    not, it avoids allocating memory at all. With this advantage, we can
    include this feature into the kernel in default and can avoid rebuild and
    solve related problems.

    Until now, memcg uses this technique. But, now, memcg decides to embed
    their variable to struct page itself and it's code to extend struct page
    has been removed. I'd like to use this code to develop debug feature, so
    this patch resurrect it.

    To help these things to work well, this patch introduces two callbacks for
    clients. One is the need callback which is mandatory if user wants to
    avoid useless memory allocation at boot-time. The other is optional, init
    callback, which is used to do proper initialization after memory is
    allocated. Detailed explanation about purpose of these functions is in
    code comment. Please refer it.

    Others are completely same with previous extension code in memcg.

    Signed-off-by: Joonsoo Kim
    Cc: Mel Gorman
    Cc: Johannes Weiner
    Cc: Minchan Kim
    Cc: Dave Hansen
    Cc: Michal Nazarewicz
    Cc: Jungsoo Son
    Cc: Ingo Molnar
    Cc: Joonsoo Kim
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Joonsoo Kim