Re: [RFC v7 00/10] DAMON: Support Physical Memory Address Space Monitoring

[Shakeel Butt]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 12:25 AM SeongJae Park <sjpark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> From: SeongJae Park <sjpark@xxxxxxxxx>
>
> Changes from Previous Version
> =============================
>
> - Use 42 as the fake target id for paddr instead of -1
> - Fix a typo
>
> Introduction
> ============
>
> DAMON[1] programming interface users can extend DAMON for any address space by
> configuring the address-space specific low level primitives with appropriate
> ones including their own implementations.  However, because the implementation
> for the virtual address space is only available now, the users should implement
> their own for other address spaces.  Worse yet, the user space users who rely
> on the debugfs interface and user space tool, cannot implement their own.
>
> This patchset implements another reference implementation of the low level
> primitives for the physical memory address space.  With this change, hence, the
> kernel space users can monitor both the virtual and the physical address spaces
> by simply changing the configuration in the runtime.  Further, this patchset
> links the implementation to the debugfs interface and the user space tool for
> the user space users.
>
> Note that the implementation supports only the user memory, as same to the idle
> page access tracking feature.
>
> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20200706115322.29598-1-sjpark@xxxxxxxxxx/
>

I am still struggling to find the benefit of this feature the way it
is implemented i.e. region based physical address space monitoring.
What exactly am I supposed to do for a given hot (or cold) physical
region? In a containerized world, that region can contain pages from
any cgroup. I can not really do anything about the accesses PHY-DAMON
provides me for a region.

Now if you give me per-page information that would be useful as I can
at least get per-cgroup accesses (idle or re-use data) but that would
be as costly as Page Idle Tracking.