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+Per-task statistics interface
+-----------------------------
+
+
+Taskstats is a netlink-based interface for sending per-task and
+per-process statistics from the kernel to userspace.
+
+Taskstats was designed for the following benefits:
+
+- efficiently provide statistics during lifetime of a task and on its exit
+- unified interface for multiple accounting subsystems
+- extensibility for use by future accounting patches
+
+Terminology
+-----------
+
+"pid", "tid" and "task" are used interchangeably and refer to the standard
+Linux task defined by struct task_struct.  per-pid stats are the same as
+per-task stats.
+
+"tgid", "process" and "thread group" are used interchangeably and refer to the
+tasks that share an mm_struct i.e. the traditional Unix process. Despite the
+use of tgid, there is no special treatment for the task that is thread group
+leader - a process is deemed alive as long as it has any task belonging to it.
+
+Usage
+-----
+
+To get statistics during a task's lifetime, userspace opens a unicast netlink
+socket (NETLINK_GENERIC family) and sends commands specifying a pid or a tgid.
+The response contains statistics for a task (if pid is specified) or the sum of
+statistics for all tasks of the process (if tgid is specified).
+
+To obtain statistics for tasks which are exiting, the userspace listener
+sends a register command and specifies a cpumask. Whenever a task exits on
+one of the cpus in the cpumask, its per-pid statistics are sent to the
+registered listener. Using cpumasks allows the data received by one listener
+to be limited and assists in flow control over the netlink interface and is
+explained in more detail below.
+
+If the exiting task is the last thread exiting its thread group,
+an additional record containing the per-tgid stats is also sent to userspace.
+The latter contains the sum of per-pid stats for all threads in the thread
+group, both past and present.
+
+getdelays.c is a simple utility demonstrating usage of the taskstats interface
+for reporting delay accounting statistics. Users can register cpumasks,
+send commands and process responses, listen for per-tid/tgid exit data,
+write the data received to a file and do basic flow control by increasing
+receive buffer sizes.
+
+Interface
+---------
+
+The user-kernel interface is encapsulated in include/linux/taskstats.h
+
+To avoid this documentation becoming obsolete as the interface evolves, only
+an outline of the current version is given. taskstats.h always overrides the
+description here.
+
+struct taskstats is the common accounting structure for both per-pid and
+per-tgid data. It is versioned and can be extended by each accounting subsystem
+that is added to the kernel. The fields and their semantics are defined in the
+taskstats.h file.
+
+The data exchanged between user and kernel space is a netlink message belonging
+to the NETLINK_GENERIC family and using the netlink attributes interface.
+The messages are in the format
+
+    +----------+- - -+-------------+-------------------+
+    | nlmsghdr | Pad |  genlmsghdr | taskstats payload |
+    +----------+- - -+-------------+-------------------+
+
+
+The taskstats payload is one of the following three kinds:
+
+1. Commands: Sent from user to kernel. Commands to get data on
+a pid/tgid consist of one attribute, of type TASKSTATS_CMD_ATTR_PID/TGID,
+containing a u32 pid or tgid in the attribute payload. The pid/tgid denotes
+the task/process for which userspace wants statistics.
+
+Commands to register/deregister interest in exit data from a set of cpus
+consist of one attribute, of type
+TASKSTATS_CMD_ATTR_REGISTER/DEREGISTER_CPUMASK and contain a cpumask in the
+attribute payload. The cpumask is specified as an ascii string of
+comma-separated cpu ranges e.g. to listen to exit data from cpus 1,2,3,5,7,8
+the cpumask would be "1-3,5,7-8". If userspace forgets to deregister interest
+in cpus before closing the listening socket, the kernel cleans up its interest
+set over time. However, for the sake of efficiency, an explicit deregistration
+is advisable.
+
+2. Response for a command: sent from the kernel in response to a userspace
+command. The payload is a series of three attributes of type:
+
+a) TASKSTATS_TYPE_AGGR_PID/TGID : attribute containing no payload but indicates
+a pid/tgid will be followed by some stats.
+
+b) TASKSTATS_TYPE_PID/TGID: attribute whose payload is the pid/tgid whose stats
+is being returned.
+
+c) TASKSTATS_TYPE_STATS: attribute with a struct taskstsats as payload. The
+same structure is used for both per-pid and per-tgid stats.
+
+3. New message sent by kernel whenever a task exits. The payload consists of a
+   series of attributes of the following type:
+
+a) TASKSTATS_TYPE_AGGR_PID: indicates next two attributes will be pid+stats
+b) TASKSTATS_TYPE_PID: contains exiting task's pid
+c) TASKSTATS_TYPE_STATS: contains the exiting task's per-pid stats
+d) TASKSTATS_TYPE_AGGR_TGID: indicates next two attributes will be tgid+stats
+e) TASKSTATS_TYPE_TGID: contains tgid of process to which task belongs
+f) TASKSTATS_TYPE_STATS: contains the per-tgid stats for exiting task's process
+
+
+per-tgid stats
+--------------
+
+Taskstats provides per-process stats, in addition to per-task stats, since
+resource management is often done at a process granularity and aggregating task
+stats in userspace alone is inefficient and potentially inaccurate (due to lack
+of atomicity).
+
+However, maintaining per-process, in addition to per-task stats, within the
+kernel has space and time overheads. To address this, the taskstats code
+accumalates each exiting task's statistics into a process-wide data structure.
+When the last task of a process exits, the process level data accumalated also
+gets sent to userspace (along with the per-task data).
+
+When a user queries to get per-tgid data, the sum of all other live threads in
+the group is added up and added to the accumalated total for previously exited
+threads of the same thread group.
+
+Extending taskstats
+-------------------
+
+There are two ways to extend the taskstats interface to export more
+per-task/process stats as patches to collect them get added to the kernel
+in future:
+
+1. Adding more fields to the end of the existing struct taskstats. Backward
+   compatibility is ensured by the version number within the
+   structure. Userspace will use only the fields of the struct that correspond
+   to the version its using.
+
+2. Defining separate statistic structs and using the netlink attributes
+   interface to return them. Since userspace processes each netlink attribute
+   independently, it can always ignore attributes whose type it does not
+   understand (because it is using an older version of the interface).
+
+
+Choosing between 1. and 2. is a matter of trading off flexibility and
+overhead. If only a few fields need to be added, then 1. is the preferable
+path since the kernel and userspace don't need to incur the overhead of
+processing new netlink attributes. But if the new fields expand the existing
+struct too much, requiring disparate userspace accounting utilities to
+unnecessarily receive large structures whose fields are of no interest, then
+extending the attributes structure would be worthwhile.
+
+Flow control for taskstats
+--------------------------
+
+When the rate of task exits becomes large, a listener may not be able to keep
+up with the kernel's rate of sending per-tid/tgid exit data leading to data
+loss. This possibility gets compounded when the taskstats structure gets
+extended and the number of cpus grows large.
+
+To avoid losing statistics, userspace should do one or more of the following:
+
+- increase the receive buffer sizes for the netlink sockets opened by
+listeners to receive exit data.
+
+- create more listeners and reduce the number of cpus being listened to by
+each listener. In the extreme case, there could be one listener for each cpu.
+Users may also consider setting the cpu affinity of the listener to the subset
+of cpus to which it listens, especially if they are listening to just one cpu.
+
+Despite these measures, if the userspace receives ENOBUFS error messages
+indicated overflow of receive buffers, it should take measures to handle the
+loss of data.
+
+----