• Vlastimil Babka's avatar
    mm, documentation: clarify /proc/pid/status VmSwap limitations for shmem · bf9683d6
    Vlastimil Babka authored
    This series is based on Jerome Marchand's [1] so let me quote the first
    paragraph from there:
    
    There are several shortcomings with the accounting of shared memory
    (sysV shm, shared anonymous mapping, mapping to a tmpfs file).  The
    values in /proc/<pid>/status and statm don't allow to distinguish
    between shmem memory and a shared mapping to a regular file, even though
    their implications on memory usage are quite different: at reclaim, file
    mapping can be dropped or written back on disk while shmem needs a place
    in swap.  As for shmem pages that are swapped-out or in swap cache, they
    aren't accounted at all.
    
    The original motivation for myself is that a customer found (IMHO
    rightfully) confusing that e.g.  top output for process swap usage is
    unreliable with respect to swapped out shmem pages, which are not
    accounted for.
    
    The fundamental difference between private anonymous and shmem pages is
    that the latter has PTE's converted to pte_none, and not swapents.  As
    such, they are not accounted to the number of swapents visible e.g.  in
    /proc/pid/status VmSwap row.  It might be theoretically possible to use
    swapents when swapping out shmem (without extra cost, as one has to
    change all mappers anyway), and on swap in only convert the swapent for
    the faulting process, leaving swapents in other processes until they
    also fault (so again no extra cost).  But I don't know how many
    assumptions this would break, and it would be too disruptive change for
    a relatively small benefit.
    
    Instead, my approach is to document the limitation of VmSwap, and
    provide means to determine the swap usage for shmem areas for those who
    are interested and willing to pay the price, using /proc/pid/smaps.
    Because outside of ipcs, I don't think it's possible to currently to
    determine the usage at all.  The previous patchset [1] did introduce new
    shmem-specific fields into smaps output, and functions to determine the
    values.  I take a simpler approach, noting that smaps output already has
    a "Swap: X kB" line, where currently X == 0 always for shmem areas.  I
    think we can just consider this a bug and provide the proper value by
    consulting the radix tree, as e.g.  mincore_page() does.  In the patch
    changelog I explain why this is also not perfect (and cannot be without
    swapents), but still arguably much better than showing a 0.
    
    The last two patches are adapted from Jerome's patchset and provide a
    VmRSS breakdown to RssAnon, RssFile and RssShm in /proc/pid/status.
    Hugh noted that this is a welcome addition, and I agree that it might
    help e.g.  debugging process memory usage at albeit non-zero, but still
    rather low cost of extra per-mm counter and some page flag checks.
    
    [1] http://lwn.net/Articles/611966/
    
    This patch (of 6):
    
    The documentation for /proc/pid/status does not mention that the value
    of VmSwap counts only swapped out anonymous private pages, and not
    swapped out pages of the underlying shmem objects (for shmem mappings).
    This is not obvious, so document this limitation.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarVlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
    Acked-by: default avatarKonstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@yandex-team.ru>
    Acked-by: default avatarMichal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarJerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarHugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    bf9683d6
proc.txt 85.5 KB