Re: [PATCH 1/3] mm/compaction: enhance trace output to know more about compaction internals

[Joonsoo Kim]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2015 at 09:46:27AM +0100, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> On 01/08/2015 09:18 AM, Joonsoo Kim wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 06, 2015 at 10:05:39AM +0100, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> >> On 12/03/2014 08:52 AM, Joonsoo Kim wrote:
> >> > It'd be useful to know where the both scanner is start. And, it also be
> >> > useful to know current range where compaction work. It will help to find
> >> > odd behaviour or problem on compaction.
> >> 
> >> Overall it looks good, just two questions:
> >> 1) Why change the pfn output to hexadecimal with different printf layout and
> >> change the variable names and? Is it that better to warrant people having to
> >> potentially modify their scripts parsing the old output?
> > 
> > Deciaml output has really bad readability since we manage all pages by order
> > of 2 which is well represented by hexadecimal. With hex output, we can
> > easily notice whether we move out from one pageblock to another one.
> 
> OK. I don't have any strong objection, maybe Mel should comment on this as the
> author of most of the tracepoints? But if it happens, I think converting the old
> tracepoints to new hexadecimal format should be a separate patch from adding the
> new ones.

Okay.

> 
> >> 2) Would it be useful to also print in the mm_compaction_isolate_template based
> >> tracepoints, pfn of where the particular scanner left off a block prematurely?
> >> It doesn't always match start_pfn + nr_scanned.
> > 
> > With start_pfn and end_pfn, detailed analysis is possible. We can know pageblock
> > where we actually scan and isolate and how much pages we try in that
> > pageblock and can guess why it doesn't become freepage with pageblock
> > order roughly.
> > 
> > nr_scanned is just different metric. end_pfn don't need to match with
> > start_pfn + nr_scanned.
> 
> Well that's part of my point. end_pfn is the end of the pageblock. nr_scanned
> might be lower than end_pfn - start_pfn, because we terminate in the middle of
> the pageblock. But it might be also lower, because we e.g. skip higher-order
> free pages. So we don't recognize where we terminated early.

Ah... now I see your point and found my mistake. My intention is also to
print terminated pfn rather than end_pfn of pageblock. :/
I will change it to print pfn where we terminate scanning.

Thanks.
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/