From a1b57ac061b0e348c9a878f8fa3a93a67fe6af42 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Mel Gorman Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2010 13:42:15 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] mm: document /proc/pagetypeinfo Add documentation for /proc/pagetypeinfo. Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt | 45 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 44 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt index b5c5fc65..96a44dd 100644 --- a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt +++ b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt @@ -438,6 +438,7 @@ 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) @@ -592,7 +593,7 @@ Node 0, zone DMA 0 4 5 4 4 3 ... 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. @@ -602,6 +603,48 @@ available. In this case, there are 0 chunks of 2^0*PAGE_SIZE available in 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: -- 1.8.2.3