linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 00/40] Memory allocation profiling

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Date:   Wed, 3 May 2023 13:51:23 -0400
From:   Kent Overstreet <kent.overstreet@...ux.dev>
To:     Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>
Cc:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>,
        Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@...gle.com>,
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Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/40] Memory allocation profiling

On Wed, May 03, 2023 at 06:35:49AM -1000, Tejun Heo wrote:
> Hello, Kent.
> 
> On Wed, May 03, 2023 at 04:05:08AM -0400, Kent Overstreet wrote:
> > No, we're still waiting on the tracing people to _demonstrate_, not
> > claim, that this is at all possible in a comparable way with tracing. 
> 
> So, we (meta) happen to do stuff like this all the time in the fleet to hunt
> down tricky persistent problems like memory leaks, ref leaks, what-have-you.
> In recent kernels, with kprobe and BPF, our ability to debug these sorts of
> problems has improved a great deal. Below, I'm attaching a bcc script I used
> to hunt down, IIRC, a double vfree. It's not exactly for a leak but leaks
> can follow the same pattern.
> 
> There are of course some pros and cons to this approach:
> 
> Pros:
> 
> * The framework doesn't really have any runtime overhead, so we can have it
>   deployed in the entire fleet and debug wherever problem is.
> 
> * It's fully flexible and programmable which enables non-trivial filtering
>   and summarizing to be done inside kernel w/ BPF as necessary, which is
>   pretty handy for tracking high frequency events.
> 
> * BPF is pretty performant. Dedicated built-in kernel code can do better of
>   course but BPF's jit compiled code & its data structures are fast enough.
>   I don't remember any time this was a problem.
> 
> Cons:
> 
> * BPF has some learning curve. Also the fact that what it provides is a wide
>   open field rather than something scoped out for a specific problem can
>   make it seem a bit daunting at the beginning.
> 
> * Because tracking starts when the script starts running, it doesn't know
>   anything which has happened upto that point, so you gotta pay attention to
>   handling e.g. handling frees which don't match allocs. It's kinda annoying
>   but not a huge problem usually. There are ways to build in BPF progs into
>   the kernel and load it early but I haven't experiemnted with it yet
>   personally.
> 
> I'm not necessarily against adding dedicated memory debugging mechanism but
> do wonder whether the extra benefits would be enough to justify the code and
> maintenance overhead.
> 
> Oh, a bit of delta but for anyone who's more interested in debugging
> problems like this, while I tend to go for bcc
> (https://github.com/iovisor/bcc) for this sort of problems. Others prefer to
> write against libbpf directly or use bpftrace
> (https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace).

Do you have example output?

TBH I'm skeptical that it's even possible to do full memory allocation
profiling with tracing/bpf, due to recursive memory allocations and
needing an index of outstanding allcations.