mm: introduce idle page tracking

Knowing the portion of memory that is not used by a certain application or
memory cgroup (idle memory) can be useful for partitioning the system
efficiently, e.g.  by setting memory cgroup limits appropriately.
Currently, the only means to estimate the amount of idle memory provided
by the kernel is /proc/PID/{clear_refs,smaps}: the user can clear the
access bit for all pages mapped to a particular process by writing 1 to
clear_refs, wait for some time, and then count smaps:Referenced.  However,
this method has two serious shortcomings:

 - it does not count unmapped file pages
 - it affects the reclaimer logic

To overcome these drawbacks, this patch introduces two new page flags,
Idle and Young, and a new sysfs file, /sys/kernel/mm/page_idle/bitmap.
A page's Idle flag can only be set from userspace by setting bit in
/sys/kernel/mm/page_idle/bitmap at the offset corresponding to the page,
and it is cleared whenever the page is accessed either through page tables
(it is cleared in page_referenced() in this case) or using the read(2)
system call (mark_page_accessed()). Thus by setting the Idle flag for
pages of a particular workload, which can be found e.g.  by reading
/proc/PID/pagemap, waiting for some time to let the workload access its
working set, and then reading the bitmap file, one can estimate the amount
of pages that are not used by the workload.

The Young page flag is used to avoid interference with the memory
reclaimer.  A page's Young flag is set whenever the Access bit of a page
table entry pointing to the page is cleared by writing to the bitmap file.
If page_referenced() is called on a Young page, it will add 1 to its
return value, therefore concealing the fact that the Access bit was
cleared.

Note, since there is no room for extra page flags on 32 bit, this feature
uses extended page flags when compiled on 32 bit.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix build]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: kpageidle requires an MMU]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: decouple from page-flags rework]
Signed-off-by: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov@parallels.com>
Reviewed-by: Andres Lagar-Cavilla <andreslc@google.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Raghavendra K T <raghavendra.kt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
Cc: Michel Lespinasse <walken@google.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com>
Cc: Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@openvz.org>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 12 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/Kconfig b/mm/Kconfig
index 3a4070f5ab79..6413d027c0b2 100644
--- a/mm/Kconfig
+++ b/mm/Kconfig
@@ -649,6 +649,18 @@ config DEFERRED_STRUCT_PAGE_INIT
           processes running early in the lifetime of the systemm until kswapd
           finishes the initialisation.
 
+config IDLE_PAGE_TRACKING
+        bool "Enable idle page tracking"
+        depends on SYSFS && MMU
+        select PAGE_EXTENSION if !64BIT
+        help
+          This feature allows to estimate the amount of user pages that have
+          not been touched during a given period of time. This information can
+          be useful to tune memory cgroup limits and/or for job placement
+          within a compute cluster.
+
+          See Documentation/vm/idle_page_tracking.txt for more details.
+
 config ZONE_DEVICE
         bool "Device memory (pmem, etc...) hotplug support" if EXPERT
         default !ZONE_DMA