Message-ID: <d451dce9-2217-4351-bc53-09967fa86cca@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2025 22:09:57 +0100
From: Usama Arif <usamaarif642@...il.com>
To: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@...gle.com>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>, akpm@...ux-foundation.org,
 kent.overstreet@...ux.dev, hannes@...xchg.org, rientjes@...gle.com,
 roman.gushchin@...ux.dev, harry.yoo@...cle.com, shakeel.butt@...ux.dev,
 00107082@....com, pyyjason@...il.com, pasha.tatashin@...een.com,
 souravpanda@...gle.com, linux-mm@...ck.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 1/1] alloc_tag: mark inaccurate allocation counters in
 /proc/allocinfo output



On 16/09/2025 23:27, Suren Baghdasaryan wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 10:26 PM Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@...gle.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 9:52 PM Usama Arif <usamaarif642@...il.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 16/09/2025 22:46, Suren Baghdasaryan wrote:
>>>> On Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 2:11 PM Usama Arif <usamaarif642@...il.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 16/09/2025 16:51, Suren Baghdasaryan wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 5:57 AM Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 9/16/25 01:02, Suren Baghdasaryan wrote:
>>>>>>>> While rare, memory allocation profiling can contain inaccurate counters
>>>>>>>> if slab object extension vector allocation fails. That allocation might
>>>>>>>> succeed later but prior to that, slab allocations that would have used
>>>>>>>> that object extension vector will not be accounted for. To indicate
>>>>>>>> incorrect counters, "accurate:no" marker is appended to the call site
>>>>>>>> line in the /proc/allocinfo output.
>>>>>>>> Bump up /proc/allocinfo version to reflect the change in the file format
>>>>>>>> and update documentation.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Example output with invalid counters:
>>>>>>>> allocinfo - version: 2.0
>>>>>>>>            0        0 arch/x86/kernel/kdebugfs.c:105 func:create_setup_data_nodes
>>>>>>>>            0        0 arch/x86/kernel/alternative.c:2090 func:alternatives_smp_module_add
>>>>>>>>            0        0 arch/x86/kernel/alternative.c:127 func:__its_alloc accurate:no
>>>>>>>>            0        0 arch/x86/kernel/fpu/regset.c:160 func:xstateregs_set
>>>>>>>>            0        0 arch/x86/kernel/fpu/xstate.c:1590 func:fpstate_realloc
>>>>>>>>            0        0 arch/x86/kernel/cpu/aperfmperf.c:379 func:arch_enable_hybrid_capacity_scale
>>>>>>>>            0        0 arch/x86/kernel/cpu/amd_cache_disable.c:258 func:init_amd_l3_attrs
>>>>>>>>        49152       48 arch/x86/kernel/cpu/mce/core.c:2709 func:mce_device_create accurate:no
>>>>>>>>        32768        1 arch/x86/kernel/cpu/mce/genpool.c:132 func:mce_gen_pool_create
>>>>>>>>            0        0 arch/x86/kernel/cpu/mce/amd.c:1341 func:mce_threshold_create_device
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Suggested-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>
>>>>>>>> Signed-off-by: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@...gle.com>
>>>>>>>> Acked-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeel.butt@...ux.dev>
>>>>>>>> Acked-by: Usama Arif <usamaarif642@...il.com>
>>>>>>>> Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> With this format you could instead print the accumulated size of allocations
>>>>>>> that could not allocate their objext (for the given tag). It should be then
>>>>>>> an upper bound of the actual error, because obviously we cannot recognize
>>>>>>> moments where these allocations are freed - so we don't know for which tag
>>>>>>> to decrement. Maybe it could be more useful output than the yes/no
>>>>>>> information, although of course require more storage in struct codetag, so I
>>>>>>> don't know if it's worth it.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Yeah, I'm reluctant to add more fields to the codetag and increase the
>>>>>> overhead until we have a usecases. If that happens and with the new
>>>>>> format we can add something like error_size:<value> to indicate the
>>>>>> amount of the error.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Maybe a global counter of sum size for all these missed objexts could be
>>>>>>> also maintained, and that wouldn't be an upper bound but an actual current
>>>>>>> error, that is if we can precisely determine that when freeing an object, we
>>>>>>> don't have a tag to decrement because objext allocation had failed on it and
>>>>>>> thus that allocation had incremented this global error counter and it's
>>>>>>> correct to decrement it.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> That's a good idea and should be doable without too much overhead. Thanks!
>>>>>> For the UAPI... I think for this case IOCTL would work and the use
>>>>>> scenario would be that the user sees the "accurate:no" mark and issues
>>>>>> ioctl command to retrieve this global counter value.
>>>>>> Usama, since you initiated this feature request, do you think such a
>>>>>> counter would be useful?
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> hmm, I really dont like suggesting changing /proc/allocinfo as it will break parsers,
>>>>> but it might be better to put it there?
>>>>> If the value is in the file, I imagine people will be more prone to looking at it?
>>>>> I am not completely sure if everyone will do an ioctl to try and find this out?
>>>>> Especially if you just have infra that is just automatically collecting info from
>>>>> this file.
>>>>
>>>> The current file reports per-codetag data and not global counters. We
>>>> could report it somewhere in the header but the first question to
>>>> answer is: would this be really useful (not in a way of  "nice to
>>>> have" but for a concrete usecase)? If not then I would suggest keeping
>>>> things simple until there is a need for it.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I think its a nice to have. I can't think of a concrete usecase at present.
>>>
>>> I guess a potential usecase is if you are trying to use memory allocation
>>> profiling to debug OOMs and the missed objects size is very large. I guess we
>>> wont know until this happens, but I would hope this number is usually small.
>>
>> Hmm. Missing a large allocation and not knowing about it can be a problem...
>> I'll start sketching a patch to see if tracking such a global counter
>> has any drawbacks and in the meantime I'm open to suggestions on how
>> to expose it to the userspace.
>>
>> About concerns on the IOCTL interface, would it be more usable if we
>> get the alloctop [1] or a similar tool which can be used to easily
>> issue such commands into kernel/tools?
>>
>> [1] https://android-review.git.corp.google.com/c/platform/system/memory/libmeminfo/+/3431860
> 
> Ugh, sorry. Externally accesible link would be
> https://android-review.googlesource.com/c/platform/system/memory/libmeminfo/+/3431860
> 

Yeah this would be nice to have. We do have something very similar in our infra, to basically
sort by size and store only top x entries.

When doing manually, I just do sort -g /proc/allocinfo|tail -n 30|numfmt --to=iec which is copied from
the kernel doc.

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