Re: [PATCH]: Adding a counter in vma to indicate the number of physical_pages_backing it

Rohit Seth
2006-06-13T17:10:36Z

On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 07:56 +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 June 2006 07:53, Albert Cahalan wrote:
> > Quoting two different people:
> >
> > > BTW, what is smaps used for (who uses it), anyway?
> > ...
> > > smaps is only a debugging kludge anyways and it's
> > > not a good idea to we bloat core data structures for it.
> >
> > I'd be using it in procps for the pmap command if it
> > were not so horribly nasty. I may eventually get around
> > to using it, but maybe it's just too gross to tolerate.
>
> I agree it's pretty ugly.
>
> But pmap I would consider a debugging kludge too - it should
> work when someone needs it, but it doesn't need to be particularly
> fast.
>

Providing useful information about memory consumption is hardly
debugging kludge. Quite unfortunately the rss part of the col is filled
with dashes at present. This vma based counter will allow Albert to
print useful information w/o having to traverse the whole set of page
tables.

-rohit