The patch titled mm: document /proc/pagetypeinfo has been added to the -mm tree. Its filename is mm-document-proc-pagetypeinfo.patch Before you just go and hit "reply", please: a) Consider who else should be cc'ed b) Prefer to cc a suitable mailing list as well c) Ideally: find the original patch on the mailing list and do a reply-to-all to that, adding suitable additional cc's *** Remember to use Documentation/SubmitChecklist when testing your code *** See http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/stuff/added-to-mm.txt to find out what to do about this The current -mm tree may be found at http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/mmotm/ ------------------------------------------------------ Subject: mm: document /proc/pagetypeinfo From: Mel Gorman <mel@xxxxxxxxx> Add documentation for /proc/pagetypeinfo. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@xxxxxxxxx> Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt | 45 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 44 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff -puN Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt~mm-document-proc-pagetypeinfo Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt --- a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt~mm-document-proc-pagetypeinfo +++ a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt @@ -431,6 +431,7 @@ Table 1-5: Kernel info in /proc modules List of loaded modules mounts Mounted filesystems net Networking info (see text) + pagetypeinfo Additional page allocator information (see text) (2.5) partitions Table of partitions known to the system pci Deprecated info of PCI bus (new way -> /proc/bus/pci/, decoupled by lspci (2.4) @@ -585,7 +586,7 @@ Node 0, zone DMA 0 4 Node 0, zone Normal 1 0 0 1 101 8 ... Node 0, zone HighMem 2 0 0 1 1 0 ... -Memory fragmentation is a problem under some workloads, and buddyinfo is a +External fragmentation is a problem under some workloads, and buddyinfo is a useful tool for helping diagnose these problems. Buddyinfo will give you a clue as to how big an area you can safely allocate, or why a previous allocation failed. @@ -595,6 +596,48 @@ available. In this case, there are 0 ch ZONE_DMA, 4 chunks of 2^1*PAGE_SIZE in ZONE_DMA, 101 chunks of 2^4*PAGE_SIZE available in ZONE_NORMAL, etc... +More information relevant to external fragmentation can be found in +pagetypeinfo. + +> cat /proc/pagetypeinfo +Page block order: 9 +Pages per block: 512 + +Free pages count per migrate type at order 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 +Node 0, zone DMA, type Unmovable 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 +Node 0, zone DMA, type Reclaimable 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 +Node 0, zone DMA, type Movable 1 1 2 1 2 1 1 0 1 0 2 +Node 0, zone DMA, type Reserve 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 +Node 0, zone DMA, type Isolate 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 +Node 0, zone DMA32, type Unmovable 103 54 77 1 1 1 11 8 7 1 9 +Node 0, zone DMA32, type Reclaimable 0 0 2 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 +Node 0, zone DMA32, type Movable 169 152 113 91 77 54 39 13 6 1 452 +Node 0, zone DMA32, type Reserve 1 2 2 2 2 0 1 1 1 1 0 +Node 0, zone DMA32, type Isolate 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 + +Number of blocks type Unmovable Reclaimable Movable Reserve Isolate +Node 0, zone DMA 2 0 5 1 0 +Node 0, zone DMA32 41 6 967 2 0 + +Fragmentation avoidance in the kernel works by grouping pages of different +migrate types into the same contiguous regions of memory called page blocks. +A page block is typically the size of the default hugepage size e.g. 2MB on +X86-64. By keeping pages grouped based on their ability to move, the kernel +can reclaim pages within a page block to satisfy a high-order allocation. + +The pagetypinfo begins with information on the size of a page block. It +then gives the same type of information as buddyinfo except broken down +by migrate-type and finishes with details on how many page blocks of each +type exist. + +If min_free_kbytes has been tuned correctly (recommendations made by hugeadm +from libhugetlbfs http://sourceforge.net/projects/libhugetlbfs/), one can +make an estimate of the likely number of huge pages that can be allocated +at a given point in time. All the "Movable" blocks should be allocatable +unless memory has been mlock()'d. Some of the Reclaimable blocks should +also be allocatable although a lot of filesystem metadata may have to be +reclaimed to achieve this. + .............................................................................. meminfo: _ Patches currently in -mm which might be from mel@xxxxxxxxx are linux-next.patch page-allocator-reduce-fragmentation-in-buddy-allocator-by-adding-buddies-that-are-merging-to-the-tail-of-the-free-lists.patch vmscan-check-high-watermark-after-shrink-zone.patch vmscan-check-high-watermark-after-shrink-zone-fix.patch mm-page_allocc-remove-duplicate-call-to-trace_mm_page_free_direct.patch mm-page_allocc-adjust-a-call-site-to-trace_mm_page_free_direct.patch mm-remove-function-free_hot_page.patch mm-remove-function-free_hot_page-fix.patch mm-restore-zone-all_unreclaimable-to-independence-word-fix.patch mm-restore-zone-all_unreclaimable-to-independence-word-fix-2.patch mm-fix-mbind-vma-merge-problem.patch mm-fix-mbind-vma-merge-problem-fix.patch mm-suppress-pfn-range-output-for-zones-without-pages.patch mm-document-proc-pagetypeinfo.patch nodemaskh-remove-macro-any_online_node.patch delay-accounting-re-implement-c-for-getdelaysc-to-report-information-on-a-target-command.patch delay-accounting-re-implement-c-for-getdelaysc-to-report-information-on-a-target-command-checkpatch-fixes.patch add-debugging-aid-for-memory-initialisation-problems.patch -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe mm-commits" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html