There is currently no good way to query the page cache state of large file
sets and directory trees. There is mincore(), but it scales poorly: the
kernel writes out a lot of bitmap data that userspace has to aggregate,
when the user really doesn not care about per-page information in that
case. The user also needs to mmap and unmap each file as it goes along,
which can be quite slow as well.
Some use cases where this information could come in handy:
* Allowing database to decide whether to perform an index scan or
direct table queries based on the in-memory cache state of the
index.
* Visibility into the writeback algorithm, for performance issues
diagnostic.
* Workload-aware writeback pacing: estimating IO fulfilled by page
cache (and IO to be done) within a range of a file, allowing for
more frequent syncing when and where there is IO capacity, and
batching when there is not.
* Computing memory usage of large files/directory trees, analogous to
the du tool for disk usage.
More information about these use cases could be found in the following
thread:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230315170934.GA97793@cmpxchg.org/
This patch implements a new syscall that queries cache state of a file and
summarizes the number of cached pages, number of dirty pages, number of
pages marked for writeback, number of (recently) evicted pages, etc. in a
given range. Currently, the syscall is only wired in for x86
architecture.
NAME
cachestat - query the page cache statistics of a file.
SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/mman.h>
struct cachestat_range {
__u64 off;
__u64 len;
};
struct cachestat {
__u64 nr_cache;
__u64 nr_dirty;
__u64 nr_writeback;
__u64 nr_evicted;
__u64 nr_recently_evicted;
};
int cachestat(unsigned int fd, struct cachestat_range *cstat_range,
struct cachestat *cstat, unsigned int flags);
DESCRIPTION
cachestat() queries the number of cached pages, number of dirty
pages, number of pages marked for writeback, number of evicted
pages, number of recently evicted pages, in the bytes range given by
`off` and `len`.
An evicted page is a page that is previously in the page cache but
has been evicted since. A page is recently evicted if its last
eviction was recent enough that its reentry to the cache would
indicate that it is actively being used by the system, and that
there is memory pressure on the system.
These values are returned in a cachestat struct, whose address is
given by the `cstat` argument.
The `off` and `len` arguments must be non-negative integers. If
`len` > 0, the queried range is [`off`, `off` + `len`]. If `len` ==
0, we will query in the range from `off` to the end of the file.
The `flags` argument is unused for now, but is included for future
extensibility. User should pass 0 (i.e no flag specified).
Currently, hugetlbfs is not supported.
Because the status of a page can change after cachestat() checks it
but before it returns to the application, the returned values may
contain stale information.
RETURN VALUE
On success, cachestat returns 0. On error, -1 is returned, and errno
is set to indicate the error.
ERRORS
EFAULT cstat or cstat_args points to an invalid address.
EINVAL invalid flags.
EBADF invalid file descriptor.
EOPNOTSUPP file descriptor is of a hugetlbfs file
[nphamcs@gmail.com: replace rounddown logic with the existing helper]
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20230504022044.3675469-1-nphamcs@gmail.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20230503013608.2431726-3-nphamcs@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: Nhat Pham <nphamcs@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
cf264e1329