Re: ksm questions

[Ni zhan Chen <nizhan.chen@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/24/2012 07:46 PM, Izik Eidus wrote:

On 10/24/2012 01:19 PM, Ni zhan Chen wrote:

Hi all,

I have some questions about ksm.

1) khugepaged default nice value is 19, but ksmd default nice value is 5, why this big different?
2) why ksm doesn't support pagecache and tmpfs now? What's the bottleneck?
3) ksm kernel doc said that "KSM only merges anonymous(private) pages, never pagecache(file) pages". But where judege it should be private?
4) ksm kernel doc said that "To avoid the instability and the resulting false negatives to be permanent, KSM re-initializes the unstable tree root node to an empty tree, at every KSM pass." But I can't find where re-initializes the unstable tree, could you explain me?

in scan_get_next_rmap_item(), if (slot == &ksm_mm_head) then we do root_unstable_tree = RB_ROOT; this will result in root_unstable_tree being empty.

Hi Izik,

Another four questions, thank for your patience and excellent codes. :-)

1) Why judge if(page->mapping != expected_mapping) in function get_ksm_page called twice? And it also call put_page(page) in the second time, when this put_page associated get_page(page) is called?
2)
in function scan_get_next_rmap_item，
if (PageAnon(*page)) ||
    page_trans_compound_anon(*page)) {
    flush_anon_page(vma, *page, ksm_scan.address);
    flush_dcache_page(*page);
    rmap_item = get_next_rmap_item(slot,
。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。
why call flush_dcache_page here? in kernel doc Documentation/cachetlb.txt, it said that "Any time the kernel writes to a page cache page, _OR_ the kernel is about to read from a page cache page and user space shared/writable mappings of this page potentially exist, this routine is called", it is used for flush page cache related cpu cache, but ksmd only scan anonymous page.
3) in function remove_rmap_item_from_tree, how to understand formula age = (unsigned char) (ksm_scan.seqr - rmap_item->address); why need aging?
4) in function page_volatile_show, how to understand ksm_pages_volatile = ksm_rmap_items - ksm_pages_shared - ksm_pages_sharing - ksm_pages_unshared; I mean that how this formula can figure out "how many pages changing too fast to be placed in a tree"?

Regards,
Chen

Thanks in advance. :-)

Regards,
Chen