Re: statm_pgd_range() sucks!

From: William Lee Irwin III (wli@holomorphy.com)
Date: Thu Aug 29 2002 - 22:12:08 EST


William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> (1) shared, lib, text, & total are now reported as what's mapped
>> instead of what's resident. This actually fixes two bugs:

On Thu, Aug 29, 2002 at 07:51:44PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> hmm. Personally, I've never believed, or even bothered to try to
> understand what those columns are measuring. Does anyone actually
> find them useful for anything? If so, what are they being used for?
> What info do we really, actually want to know?

I'm basically looking for VSZ, RSS, %cpu, & pid -- after that I don't
care. top(1) examines a lot more than it feeds into the display, for
reasons unknown. In principle, there are ways of recovering the other
bits that seem too complex to be worthy of doing:

(1) update a mm->shared counter on every PG_direct break/collapse
(2) walk the pte_chain updating mm->dirty for each pte every time
        set_page_dirty() or ClearPageDirty() is done
(3) binfmt helpers + arch specific helpers for the binfmt helpers for
        keeping count of up mm->lib

(1) doesn't sound good because pte_chain stuff is already a big hotspot
(2) doesn't sound good for the same reason
(3) sounds like a portability nightmare

i.e. Not worth doing. esp. for stats of which only (1) is used/usable,
and the value of (1) in question (IMHO) due to the longstanding
misreporting.

On Thu, Aug 29, 2002 at 07:51:44PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Reporting the size of the vma is really inaccurate for many situations,
> and the info which you're showing here can be generated from
> /proc/pid/maps. And it would be nice to get something useful out of this.
> Would it be hard to add an `nr_pages' occupancy counter to vm_area_struct?
> Go and add all those up?

If top(1) understood/used /proc/$PID/maps that'd be fine. It's more or
less a "vaguely compatible placeholder" aside from RSS, and there's
some kind of burden of vague compatibility for /proc/ stuff.

Per-vma RSS is trivial, just less self-contained. Everywhere the
mm->rss is touched, the vma to account that to is also known, except
for put_dirty_page(), and that can be repaired as its caller knows.

Cheers,
Bill
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