linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm, slab: Extend vm/drop

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Date:   Fri, 28 Jun 2019 09:31:28 +0200
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
To:     Waiman Long <longman@...hat.com>
Cc:     Christoph Lameter <cl@...ux.com>,
        Pekka Enberg <penberg@...nel.org>,
        David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>,
        Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@....com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Alexander Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
        Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@...nel.org>,
        Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
        Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@...il.com>, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        linux-doc@...r.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org,
        cgroups@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        Roman Gushchin <guro@...com>,
        Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@...gle.com>,
        Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@...hat.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm, slab: Extend vm/drop_caches to shrink kmem slabs

On Thu 27-06-19 17:16:04, Waiman Long wrote:
> On 6/27/19 11:15 AM, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Mon 24-06-19 13:42:19, Waiman Long wrote:
> >> With the slub memory allocator, the numbers of active slab objects
> >> reported in /proc/slabinfo are not real because they include objects
> >> that are held by the per-cpu slab structures whether they are actually
> >> used or not.  The problem gets worse the more CPUs a system have. For
> >> instance, looking at the reported number of active task_struct objects,
> >> one will wonder where all the missing tasks gone.
> >>
> >> I know it is hard and costly to get a real count of active objects.
> > What exactly is expensive? Why cannot slabinfo reduce the number of
> > active objects by per-cpu cached objects?
> >
> The number of cachelines that needs to be accessed in order to get an
> accurate count will be much higher if we need to iterate through all the
> per-cpu structures. In addition, accessing the per-cpu partial list will
> be racy.

Why is all that a problem for a root only interface that should be used
quite rarely (it is not something that you should be reading hundreds
time per second, right)?
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs