On Mon, Oct 15, 2007 at 04:34:57PM -0700, Dave Hansen wrote: > On Mon, 2007-10-15 at 18:11 -0500, Matt Mackall wrote: > > > Could we just have /proc/kpagereferenced? Is there a legitimate need > > > for other flags to be visible? > > > > Referenced, dirty, uptodate, lru, active, slab, writeback, reclaim, > > and buddy all look like they might be interesting to me from the point > > of view of watching what's happening in the VM graphically in > > real-time. > > This is true, but it forces a lot of logic from the kernel to be run in > userspace to figure out what is going on. Looking at mainline today: > > #define PG_reclaim 17 /* To be reclaimed asap */ > ... > #define PG_readahead PG_reclaim /* Reminder to do async read-ahead > */ > > All of a sudden, to figure out which flag it actually is, we need to > have all of the logic that the kernel does. > > Does this establish a fixed user<->kernel ABI that will keep us from > doing this in the future: > > -#define PG_slab 7 /* slab debug (Suparna wants this) */ > +#define PG_slab 14 /* slab debug (Suparna wants this) > */ > > Or, even something like this: > > -#define PageSlab(page) test_bit(PG_slab, &(page)->flags) > +#define PageSlab(page) (!PageLRU(page) && !PageHighmem(page))
Yeah, there are a bunch of flags that aren't mutually exclusive and we could probably recover a few. > If we actually had several (or even still one file) that exposed this > state, independent of the actual content of page->flags, I think we'd be > better off. I think that's the difference between a fun, super-useful > debugging feature and one that can stay in mainline and have > applications stay using it (without breaking) for a long time. > > The flags you listed are things that I would imagine will always exist, > logically. But, we might not always have a specific page flag for pages > under writeback or in the buddy list for that matter. PG_buddy isn't > that old. Perhaps that would be better abstracted to something like > page_in_main_allocator(). Perhaps we need something like: flags = page->flags; userflags = FLAG_BIT(USER_REFERENCED, flags & PG_referenced) | ... etc. for the flags we want to export. This will let us change to FLAG_BIT(USER_SLAB, PageSlab(page)) | if we make a virtual slab bit. And it shows up in grep. Unfortunately, i386 test_bit is an asm inline and not a macro so we can't hope for the compiler to fold up a bunch of identity bit mappings for us. -- Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/