Today, the MGLRU debugfs interface (/sys/kernel/debug/lru_gen) provides a histogram counting the number of pages belonging to each generation, providing some data for memory coldness, but we don't actually know where the memory actually is. However, since MGLRU revamps the page reclaim mechanism to walk page tables, we can hook into MGLRU page table access bit harvesting with a BPF program to collect information on relative hotness and coldness, NUMA nodes, whether a page is anon/file, etc. Using BPF programs to collect and aggregate page access information allows for the userspace agent to customize what to collect and how to aggregate. It could focus on a particular region of interest and count a moving average access frequency, or find allocations that are never accessed that could be eliminated all together. Currently MGLRU relies on heuristics with regards to what generation a page is assigned, for example, pages accessed through page tables are always assigned to the youngest generation. Exposing page access data can allow future work to customize page generation assignments (with more BPF). We demonstrate feasibility with a proof-of-concept that prints a live heatmap of a process, with configurable MGLRU aging intervals and aggregation intervals. This is a very rough PoC that still needs a lot of work, but it shows a lot can be done by exposing page access information from MGLRU. I will be presenting this work at the coming LPC. As an example. I ran the memtier benchmark[1] and captured a heatmap of memcached being populated and running the benchmark (similar to the one Yu posted for OpenWRT[2]): $ cat ./run_memtier_benchmark.sh run_memtier_benchmark() { # populate dataset memtier_benchmark/memtier_benchmark -s 127.0.0.1 -p 11211 \ -P memcache_binary -n allkeys -t 1 -c 1 --ratio 1:0 --pipeline 8 \ --key-minimum=1 --key-maximum=$2 --key-pattern=P:P \ -d 1000 # access dataset using Guassian pattern memtier_benchmark/memtier_benchmark -s 127.0.0.1 -p 11211 \ -P memcache_binary --test-time $1 -t 1 -c 1 --ratio 0:1 \ --pipeline 8 --key-minimum=1 --key-maximum=$2 \ --key-pattern=G:G --randomize --distinct-client-seed # collect results } run_duration_secs=3600 max_key=8000000 run_memtier_benchmark $run_duration_secs $max_key In the following screenshot we can see the process of populating the dataset and accessing the dataset: https://services.google.com/fh/files/events/memcached_memtier_startup.png Patch 1 adds the infrastructure to enable BPF programs to monitor page access bit harvesting Patch 2 includes a proof-of-concept python TUI program displaying online per-process heatmaps. [1] https://github.com/RedisLabs/memtier_benchmark [2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20220831041731.3836322-1-yuzhao@xxxxxxxxxx/ Yuanchu Xie (2): mm: multi-gen LRU: support page access info harvesting with eBPF mm: add a BPF-based per-process heatmap tool include/linux/mmzone.h | 1 + mm/vmscan.c | 154 ++++++++ tools/vm/heatmap/Makefile | 30 ++ tools/vm/heatmap/heatmap.bpf.c | 123 +++++++ tools/vm/heatmap/heatmap.user.c | 188 ++++++++++ tools/vm/heatmap/heatmap_tui.py | 600 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 6 files changed, 1096 insertions(+) create mode 100644 tools/vm/heatmap/Makefile create mode 100644 tools/vm/heatmap/heatmap.bpf.c create mode 100644 tools/vm/heatmap/heatmap.user.c create mode 100755 tools/vm/heatmap/heatmap_tui.py -- 2.37.2.789.g6183377224-goog