[PATCH 04/12] mm: Document /proc/pagetypeinfo
From: Mel Gorman
Date: Thu Feb 18 2010 - 13:02:59 EST
This patch adds documentation for /proc/pagetypeinfo.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mel@xxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
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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