Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 18 Apr 2018 10:26:36 +0900 | From | Minchan Kim <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH v5 4/4] zram: introduce zram memory tracking |
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Hi Andrew,
On Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 02:59:21PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > On Mon, 16 Apr 2018 18:09:46 +0900 Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> wrote: > > > zRam as swap is useful for small memory device. However, swap means > > those pages on zram are mostly cold pages due to VM's LRU algorithm. > > Especially, once init data for application are touched for launching, > > they tend to be not accessed any more and finally swapped out. > > zRAM can store such cold pages as compressed form but it's pointless > > to keep in memory. Better idea is app developers free them directly > > rather than remaining them on heap. > > > > This patch tell us last access time of each block of zram via > > "cat /sys/kernel/debug/zram/zram0/block_state". > > > > The output is as follows, > > 300 75.033841 .wh > > 301 63.806904 s.. > > 302 63.806919 ..h > > > > First column is zram's block index and 3rh one represents symbol > > (s: same page w: written page to backing store h: huge page) of the > > block state. Second column represents usec time unit of the block > > was last accessed. So above example means the 300th block is accessed > > at 75.033851 second and it was huge so it was written to the backing > > store. > > > > Admin can leverage this information to catch cold|incompressible pages > > of process with *pagemap* once part of heaps are swapped out. > > A few things.. > > - Terms like "Admin can" and "Admin could" are worrisome. How do we > know that admins *will* use this? How do we know that we aren't > adding a bunch of stuff which nobody will find to be (sufficiently) > useful? For example, is there some userspace tool to which you are > contributing which will be updated to use this feature?
Actually, I used this feature two years ago to find memory hogger although the feature was very fast prototyping. It was very useful to reduce memory cost in embedded space.
The reason I am trying to upstream the feature is I need the feature again. :)
Yub, I have a userspace tool to use the feature although it was not compatible with this new version. It should be updated with new format. I will find a time to submit the tool.
> > - block_state's second column is in microseconds since some > undocumented time. But how is userspace to know how much time has > elapsed since the access? ie, "current time".
It's a sched_clock so it should be elapsed time since the system boot. I should have written it explictly. I will fix it.
> > - Is the sched_clock() return value suitable for exporting to > userspace? Is it monotonic? Is it consistent across CPUs, across > CPU hotadd/remove, across suspend/resume, etc? Does it run all the > way up to 2^64 on all CPU types, or will some processors wrap it at > (say) 32 bits? etcetera. Documentation/timers/timekeeping.txt > points out that suspend/resume can mess it up and that the counter > can drift between cpus.
Good point!
I just referenced it from ftrace because I thought the goal is similiar "no need to be exact unless the drift is frequent but wanted to be fast"
AFAIK, ftrace/printk is active user of the function so if the problem happens frequently, it might be serious. :)
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