Documentation/mm/page_owner.rst

Source file repositories/reference/linux-study-clean/Documentation/mm/page_owner.rst

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Linux kernel
Corpus path
Documentation/mm/page_owner.rst
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.rst
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9859 bytes
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Domain
Support Tooling And Documentation
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Documentation
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Support Tooling And Documentation: documentation
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Why This File Exists

Repository support layer: documentation, build tooling, samples, user-space helper tools, generated initramfs support, licenses, and validation utilities.

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page owner: Tracking about who allocated each page
==================================================

Introduction
============

page owner is for the tracking about who allocated each page.
It can be used to debug memory leak or to find a memory hogger.
When allocation happens, information about allocation such as call stack
and order of pages is stored into certain storage for each page.
When we need to know about status of all pages, we can get and analyze
this information.

Although we already have tracepoint for tracing page allocation/free,
using it for analyzing who allocate each page is rather complex. We need
to enlarge the trace buffer for preventing overlapping until userspace
program launched. And, launched program continually dump out the trace
buffer for later analysis and it would change system behaviour with more
possibility rather than just keeping it in memory, so bad for debugging.

page owner can also be used for various purposes. For example, accurate
fragmentation statistics can be obtained through gfp flag information of
each page. It is already implemented and activated if page owner is
enabled. Other usages are more than welcome.

It can also be used to show all the stacks and their current number of
allocated base pages, which gives us a quick overview of where the memory
is going without the need to screen through all the pages and match the
allocation and free operation. It's also possible to show only a numeric
identifier of all the stacks (without stack traces) and their number of
allocated base pages (faster to read and parse, eg, for monitoring) that
can be matched with stacks later (show_handles and show_stacks_handles).

page owner is disabled by default. So, if you'd like to use it, you need
to add "page_owner=on" to your boot cmdline. If the kernel is built
with page owner and page owner is disabled in runtime due to not enabling
boot option, runtime overhead is marginal. If disabled in runtime, it
doesn't require memory to store owner information, so there is no runtime
memory overhead. And, page owner inserts just two unlikely branches into
the page allocator hotpath and if not enabled, then allocation is done
like as the kernel without page owner. These two unlikely branches should
not affect to allocation performance, especially if the static keys jump
label patching functionality is available. Following is the kernel's code
size change due to this facility.

Although enabling page owner increases kernel size by several kilobytes,
most of this code is outside page allocator and its hot path. Building
the kernel with page owner and turning it on if needed would be great
option to debug kernel memory problem.

There is one notice that is caused by implementation detail. page owner
stores information into the memory from struct page extension. This memory
is initialized some time later than that page allocator starts in sparse
memory system, so, until initialization, many pages can be allocated and
they would have no owner information. To fix it up, these early allocated
pages are investigated and marked as allocated in initialization phase.
Although it doesn't mean that they have the right owner information,
at least, we can tell whether the page is allocated or not,
more accurately. On 2GB memory x86-64 VM box, 13343 early allocated pages
are caught and marked, although they are mostly allocated from struct
page extension feature. Anyway, after that, no page is left in
un-tracking state.

Usage
=====

1) Build user-space helper::

	cd tools/mm

Annotation

Implementation Notes