Re: [PATCH 3/3] mm: add vmstat statistics for madvise_[cold|pageout]

[Minchan Kim]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 06:27:02PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Wed 18-01-23 09:15:34, Minchan Kim wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 10:11:46AM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > On Tue 17-01-23 15:16:32, Minchan Kim wrote:
> > > > madvise LRU manipulation APIs need to scan address ranges to find
> > > > present pages at page table and provides advice hints for them.
> > > > 
> > > > Likewise pg[scan/steal] count on vmstat, madvise_pg[scanned/hinted]
> > > > shows the proactive reclaim efficiency so this patch addes those
> > > > two statistics in vmstat.
> > > 
> > > Please describe the usecase for those new counters.
> > 
> > I wanted to know the proactive reclaim efficieny using MADV_COLD/MDDV_PAGEOUT.
> > Userspace has several policy which when/which vmas need to be hinted by the call
> > and they are evolving. I needed to know how effectively their policy works since
> > the vma ranges are huge(i.e., nr_hinted/nr_scanned).
> 
> I can see how that can be an interesting information but is there
> anything actionable about that beyond debugging purposes? In other words
> isn't this something that could be done by tracing instead?

That's the statictis for telemetry. With those stat, we are collecting
various vmstat fields(i.e., pgsteal/pgscan) from real field devices
and thought those two stats would be good fit along with other reclaim
statistics in vmstat since we can know how much proactive madvise policy
could make system healthier(e.g., less kswapd scan, less allocstall
and so on).

> 
> Also how are you going to identify specific madvise calls when they can
> interleave arbitrarily?

I guess you are talking about how we could separate MADV_PAGEOUT and
MADV_COLD from vmstat. That's valid question. I thought for the start,
adds just umbrella stat like this and if we want to break down, we need
to introudce sysfs likewise slab.