Re: [External] Re: [PATCH] fs/proc/kcore.c: add mmap interface

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Thu May 27 2021 - 18:31:00 EST


On Thu, 27 May 2021 14:13:09 +0800 zhoufeng <zhoufeng.zf@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > I'm surprised that it makes this much difference. Has DRGN been fully
> > optimised to minimise the amount of pread()ing which it does? Why does
> > it do so much reading?
> DRGN is a tool similar to Crash, but much lighter. It allows users to
> obtain kernel data structures from Python scripts. Based on this, we
> intend to use DRGN for kernel monitoring. So we used some pressure test
> scripts to test the loss of monitoring.
> Monitoring is all about getting current real-time data, so every time
> DRGN tries to get kernel data, it needs to read /proc/kcore. In my
> script, I tried to loop 1000 times to obtain the information of all the
> processes in the machine, in order to construct a scene where kernel
> data is frequently read. So, the frequency in the default version of
> kcore, pread is very high. In view of this situation, our optimization
> idea is to reduce the number of context switches as much as possible
> under the scenario of frequent kernel data acquisition, to reduce the
> performance loss to a minimum, and then move the monitoring system to
> the production environment.

Why would a pread() cause a context switch?

> After running for a long time in a
> production environment, the number of kernel data reads was added as
> time went on, and the pread number also increased. If users use mmap,
> it's once for all.