[PATCH 01/12] mm: Document /proc/pagetypeinfo

[Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>]

The memory compaction patches add details to pagetypeinfo that are not
obvious and need to be documented. In preparation for this, document
what is already in /proc/pagetypeinfo.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
---
 Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt |   45 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 1 files changed, 44 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
index 0d07513..1829dfb 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
@@ -430,6 +430,7 @@ 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)
@@ -584,7 +585,7 @@ 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.
@@ -594,6 +595,48 @@ 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:
-- 
1.6.5

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