Re: [PATCH v3 00/35] Memory allocation profiling

Kent Overstreet
2024-02-16T08:42:48Z

On Fri, Feb 16, 2024 at 10:38:00AM +0200, Jani Nikula wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Feb 2024, Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com> wrote:
> > Memory allocation, v3 and final:
> >
> > Overview:
> > Low overhead [1] per-callsite memory allocation profiling. Not just for debug
> > kernels, overhead low enough to be deployed in production.
> >
> > We're aiming to get this in the next merge window, for 6.9. The feedback
> > we've gotten has been that even out of tree this patchset has already
> > been useful, and there's a significant amount of other work gated on the
> > code tagging functionality included in this patchset [2].
>
> I wonder if it wouldn't be too much trouble to write at least a brief
> overview document under Documentation/ describing what this is all
> about? Even as follow-up. People seeing the patch series have the
> benefit of the cover letter and the commit messages, but that's hardly
> documentation.
>
> We have all these great frameworks and tools but their discoverability
> to kernel developers isn't always all that great.

commit f589b48789de4b8f77bfc70b9f3ab2013c01eaf2
Author: Kent Overstreet <kent.overstreet@linux.dev>
Date: Wed Feb 14 01:13:04 2024 -0500

memprofiling: Documentation

Signed-off-by: Kent Overstreet <kent.overstreet@linux.dev>

diff --git a/Documentation/mm/allocation-profiling.rst b/Documentation/mm/allocation-profiling.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..d906e9360279
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/mm/allocation-profiling.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,68 @@
+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+===========================
+MEMORY ALLOCATION PROFILING
+===========================
+
+Low overhead (suitable for production) accounting of all memory allocations,
+tracked by file and line number.
+
+Usage:
+kconfig options:
+ - CONFIG_MEM_ALLOC_PROFILING
+ - CONFIG_MEM_ALLOC_PROFILING_ENABLED_BY_DEFAULT
+ - CONFIG_MEM_ALLOC_PROFILING_DEBUG
+ adds warnings for allocations that weren't accounted because of a
+ missing annotation
+
+sysctl:
+ /proc/sys/vm/mem_profiling
+
+Runtime info:
+ /proc/allocinfo
+
+Example output:
+ root@moria-kvm:~# sort -h /proc/allocinfo|tail
+ 3.11MiB 2850 fs/ext4/super.c:1408 module:ext4 func:ext4_alloc_inode
+ 3.52MiB 225 kernel/fork.c:356 module:fork func:alloc_thread_stack_node
+ 3.75MiB 960 mm/page_ext.c:270 module:page_ext func:alloc_page_ext
+ 4.00MiB 2 mm/khugepaged.c:893 module:khugepaged func:hpage_collapse_alloc_folio
+ 10.5MiB 168 block/blk-mq.c:3421 module:blk_mq func:blk_mq_alloc_rqs
+ 14.0MiB 3594 include/linux/gfp.h:295 module:filemap func:folio_alloc_noprof
+ 26.8MiB 6856 include/linux/gfp.h:295 module:memory func:folio_alloc_noprof
+ 64.5MiB 98315 fs/xfs/xfs_rmap_item.c:147 module:xfs func:xfs_rui_init
+ 98.7MiB 25264 include/linux/gfp.h:295 module:readahead func:folio_alloc_noprof
+ 125MiB 7357 mm/slub.c:2201 module:slub func:alloc_slab_page
+
+
+Theory of operation:
+
+Memory allocation profiling builds off of code tagging, which is a library for
+declaring static structs (that typcially describe a file and line number in
+some way, hence code tagging) and then finding and operating on them at runtime
+- i.e. iterating over them to print them in debugfs/procfs.
+
+To add accounting for an allocation call, we replace it with a macro
+invocation, alloc_hooks(), that
+ - declares a code tag
+ - stashes a pointer to it in task_struct
+ - calls the real allocation function
+ - and finally, restores the task_struct alloc tag pointer to its previous value.
+
+This allows for alloc_hooks() calls to be nested, with the most recent one
+taking effect. This is important for allocations internal to the mm/ code that
+do not properly belong to the outer allocation context and should be counted
+separately: for example, slab object extension vectors, or when the slab
+allocates pages from the page allocator.
+
+Thus, proper usage requires determining which function in an allocation call
+stack should be tagged. There are many helper functions that essentially wrap
+e.g. kmalloc() and do a little more work, then are called in multiple places;
+we'll generally want the accounting to happen in the callers of these helpers,
+not in the helpers themselves.
+
+To fix up a given helper, for example foo(), do the following:
+ - switch its allocation call to the _noprof() version, e.g. kmalloc_noprof()
+ - rename it to foo_noprof()
+ - define a macro version of foo() like so:
+ #define foo(...) alloc_hooks(foo_noprof(__VA_ARGS__))