mm: document the meminfo and vmstat fields of relevance to transparent hugepages
Update Documentation/vm/transhuge.txt and Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt with some information on monitoring transparent huge page usage and the associated overhead. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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@ -743,6 +743,7 @@ Committed_AS: 100056 kB
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VmallocTotal: 112216 kB
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VmallocUsed: 428 kB
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VmallocChunk: 111088 kB
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AnonHugePages: 49152 kB
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MemTotal: Total usable ram (i.e. physical ram minus a few reserved
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bits and the kernel binary code)
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@ -776,6 +777,7 @@ VmallocChunk: 111088 kB
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Dirty: Memory which is waiting to get written back to the disk
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Writeback: Memory which is actively being written back to the disk
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AnonPages: Non-file backed pages mapped into userspace page tables
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AnonHugePages: Non-file backed huge pages mapped into userspace page tables
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Mapped: files which have been mmaped, such as libraries
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Slab: in-kernel data structures cache
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SReclaimable: Part of Slab, that might be reclaimed, such as caches
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@ -166,6 +166,68 @@ behavior. So to make them effective you need to restart any
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application that could have been using hugepages. This also applies to
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the regions registered in khugepaged.
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== Monitoring usage ==
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The number of transparent huge pages currently used by the system is
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available by reading the AnonHugePages field in /proc/meminfo. To
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identify what applications are using transparent huge pages, it is
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necessary to read /proc/PID/smaps and count the AnonHugePages fields
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for each mapping. Note that reading the smaps file is expensive and
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reading it frequently will incur overhead.
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There are a number of counters in /proc/vmstat that may be used to
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monitor how successfully the system is providing huge pages for use.
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thp_fault_alloc is incremented every time a huge page is successfully
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allocated to handle a page fault. This applies to both the
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first time a page is faulted and for COW faults.
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thp_collapse_alloc is incremented by khugepaged when it has found
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a range of pages to collapse into one huge page and has
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successfully allocated a new huge page to store the data.
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thp_fault_fallback is incremented if a page fault fails to allocate
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a huge page and instead falls back to using small pages.
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thp_collapse_alloc_failed is incremented if khugepaged found a range
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of pages that should be collapsed into one huge page but failed
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the allocation.
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thp_split is incremented every time a huge page is split into base
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pages. This can happen for a variety of reasons but a common
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reason is that a huge page is old and is being reclaimed.
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As the system ages, allocating huge pages may be expensive as the
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system uses memory compaction to copy data around memory to free a
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huge page for use. There are some counters in /proc/vmstat to help
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monitor this overhead.
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compact_stall is incremented every time a process stalls to run
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memory compaction so that a huge page is free for use.
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compact_success is incremented if the system compacted memory and
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freed a huge page for use.
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compact_fail is incremented if the system tries to compact memory
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but failed.
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compact_pages_moved is incremented each time a page is moved. If
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this value is increasing rapidly, it implies that the system
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is copying a lot of data to satisfy the huge page allocation.
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It is possible that the cost of copying exceeds any savings
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from reduced TLB misses.
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compact_pagemigrate_failed is incremented when the underlying mechanism
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for moving a page failed.
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compact_blocks_moved is incremented each time memory compaction examines
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a huge page aligned range of pages.
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It is possible to establish how long the stalls were using the function
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tracer to record how long was spent in __alloc_pages_nodemask and
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using the mm_page_alloc tracepoint to identify which allocations were
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for huge pages.
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== get_user_pages and follow_page ==
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get_user_pages and follow_page if run on a hugepage, will return the
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