Re: [PATCH v1 1/1] mm: report per-page metadata information

From: David Hildenbrand
Date: Thu Sep 14 2023 - 09:01:17 EST


On 13.09.23 19:30, Sourav Panda wrote:
Adds a new per-node PageMetadata field to
/sys/devices/system/node/nodeN/meminfo
and a global PageMetadata field to /proc/meminfo. This information can
be used by users to see how much memory is being used by per-page
metadata, which can vary depending on build configuration, machine
architecture, and system use.

Per-page metadata is the amount of memory that Linux needs in order to
manage memory at the page granularity. The majority of such memory is
used by "struct page" and "page_ext" data structures.

It's probably worth mentioning, that in contrast to most other "memory consumption" statistics, this metadata might not be included "MemTotal"; when the memmap is allocated using the memblock allocator, it's not included, when it's dynamically allocated using the buddy (e.g., memory hotplug), it's included.

--
Cheers,

David / dhildenb