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+page owner: Tracking about who allocated each page
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+-----------------------------------------------------------
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+
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+* Introduction
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+
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+page owner is for the tracking about who allocated each page.
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+It can be used to debug memory leak or to find a memory hogger.
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+When allocation happens, information about allocation such as call stack
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+and order of pages is stored into certain storage for each page.
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+When we need to know about status of all pages, we can get and analyze
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+this information.
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+
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+Although we already have tracepoint for tracing page allocation/free,
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+using it for analyzing who allocate each page is rather complex. We need
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+to enlarge the trace buffer for preventing overlapping until userspace
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+program launched. And, launched program continually dump out the trace
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+buffer for later analysis and it would change system behviour with more
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+possibility rather than just keeping it in memory, so bad for debugging.
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+
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+page owner can also be used for various purposes. For example, accurate
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+fragmentation statistics can be obtained through gfp flag information of
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+each page. It is already implemented and activated if page owner is
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+enabled. Other usages are more than welcome.
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+
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+page owner is disabled in default. So, if you'd like to use it, you need
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+to add "page_owner=on" into your boot cmdline. If the kernel is built
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+with page owner and page owner is disabled in runtime due to no enabling
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+boot option, runtime overhead is marginal. If disabled in runtime, it
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+doesn't require memory to store owner information, so there is no runtime
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+memory overhead. And, page owner inserts just two unlikely branches into
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+the page allocator hotpath and if it returns false then allocation is
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+done like as the kernel without page owner. These two unlikely branches
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+would not affect to allocation performance. Following is the kernel's
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+code size change due to this facility.
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+
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+- Without page owner
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+ text data bss dec hex filename
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+ 40662 1493 644 42799 a72f mm/page_alloc.o
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+
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+- With page owner
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+ text data bss dec hex filename
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+ 40892 1493 644 43029 a815 mm/page_alloc.o
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+ 1427 24 8 1459 5b3 mm/page_ext.o
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+ 2722 50 0 2772 ad4 mm/page_owner.o
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+
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+Although, roughly, 4 KB code is added in total, page_alloc.o increase by
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+230 bytes and only half of it is in hotpath. Building the kernel with
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+page owner and turning it on if needed would be great option to debug
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+kernel memory problem.
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+
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+There is one notice that is caused by implementation detail. page owner
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+stores information into the memory from struct page extension. This memory
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+is initialized some time later than that page allocator starts in sparse
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+memory system, so, until initialization, many pages can be allocated and
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+they would have no owner information. To fix it up, these early allocated
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+pages are investigated and marked as allocated in initialization phase.
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+Although it doesn't mean that they have the right owner information,
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+at least, we can tell whether the page is allocated or not,
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+more accurately. On 2GB memory x86-64 VM box, 13343 early allocated pages
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+are catched and marked, although they are mostly allocated from struct
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+page extension feature. Anyway, after that, no page is left in
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+un-tracking state.
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+
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+* Usage
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+
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+1) Build user-space helper
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+ cd tools/vm
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+ make page_owner_sort
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+
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+2) Enable page owner
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+ Add "page_owner=on" to boot cmdline.
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+
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+3) Do the job what you want to debug
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+
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+4) Analyze information from page owner
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+ cat /sys/kernel/debug/page_owner > page_owner_full.txt
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+ grep -v ^PFN page_owner_full.txt > page_owner.txt
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+ ./page_owner_sort page_owner.txt sorted_page_owner.txt
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+
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+ See the result about who allocated each page
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+ in the sorted_page_owner.txt.
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