linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] mm/page_owner: Record timestamp and pid

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Date:   Fri, 27 Nov 2020 20:57:43 +0200
From:   Georgi Djakov <georgi.djakov@...aro.org>
To:     Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:     linux-mm@...ck.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        sudaraja@...eaurora.org, pratikp@...eaurora.org,
        lmark@...eaurora.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm/page_owner: Record timestamp and pid

Hi Vlastimil,

Thanks for the comment!

On 11/27/20 19:52, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> On 11/12/20 8:14 PM, Andrew Morton wrote:
>> On Thu, 12 Nov 2020 20:41:06 +0200 Georgi Djakov <georgi.djakov@...aro.org> 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> From: Liam Mark <lmark@...eaurora.org>
>>>
>>> Collect the time for each allocation recorded in page owner so that
>>> allocation "surges" can be measured.
>>>
>>> Record the pid for each allocation recorded in page owner so that
>>> the source of allocation "surges" can be better identified.
>>
>> Please provide a description of why this is considered useful.  What
>> has it been used for, what problems has it been used to solve?
> 
> Worth noting that on x86_64 it doubles the size of struct page_owner
> from 16 bytes to 32, so it better be justified:

Well, that's true. But for debug options there is almost always some penalty.
The timestamp and pid information is very useful for me (and others, i believe)
when doing memory analysis. On a crash for example, we can get this information
from kdump (or RAM-dump) and look into it to catch memory allocation problems
more easily.

If you find the above argument not strong enough, how about a separate config 
option for this? Maybe something like CONFIG_PAGE_OWNER_EXTENDED, which could
be enabled in addition to CONFIG_PAGE_OWNER?

Thanks,
Georgi

> 
> struct page_owner {
>          short unsigned int         order;                /*     0     2 */
>          short int                  last_migrate_reason;  /*     2     2 */
>          gfp_t                      gfp_mask;             /*     4     4 */
>          depot_stack_handle_t       handle;               /*     8     4 */
>          depot_stack_handle_t       free_handle;          /*    12     4 */
>          u64                        ts_nsec;              /*    16     8 */
>          int                        pid;                  /*    24     4 */
> 
>          /* size: 32, cachelines: 1, members: 7 */
>          /* padding: 4 */
>          /* last cacheline: 32 bytes */
> };
>