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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/admin-guide/mm/ksm.rst')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/admin-guide/mm/ksm.rst | 65 |
1 files changed, 60 insertions, 5 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/ksm.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/ksm.rst index 874eb0c77d34..7626392fe82c 100644 --- a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/ksm.rst +++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/ksm.rst @@ -1,5 +1,3 @@ -.. _admin_guide_ksm: - ======================= Kernel Samepage Merging ======================= @@ -9,7 +7,7 @@ Overview KSM is a memory-saving de-duplication feature, enabled by CONFIG_KSM=y, added to the Linux kernel in 2.6.32. See ``mm/ksm.c`` for its implementation, -and http://lwn.net/Articles/306704/ and http://lwn.net/Articles/330589/ +and http://lwn.net/Articles/306704/ and https://lwn.net/Articles/330589/ KSM was originally developed for use with KVM (where it was known as Kernel Shared Memory), to fit more virtual machines into physical memory, @@ -22,7 +20,7 @@ content which can be replaced by a single write-protected page (which is automatically copied if a process later wants to update its content). The amount of pages that KSM daemon scans in a single pass and the time between the passes are configured using :ref:`sysfs -intraface <ksm_sysfs>` +interface <ksm_sysfs>` KSM only merges anonymous (private) pages, never pagecache (file) pages. KSM's merged pages were originally locked into kernel memory, but can now @@ -52,7 +50,7 @@ with EAGAIN, but more probably arousing the Out-Of-Memory killer. If KSM is not configured into the running kernel, madvise MADV_MERGEABLE and MADV_UNMERGEABLE simply fail with EINVAL. If the running kernel was built with CONFIG_KSM=y, those calls will normally succeed: even if the -the KSM daemon is not currently running, MADV_MERGEABLE still registers +KSM daemon is not currently running, MADV_MERGEABLE still registers the range for whenever the KSM daemon is started; even if the range cannot contain any pages which KSM could actually merge; even if MADV_UNMERGEABLE is applied to a range which was never MADV_MERGEABLE. @@ -159,6 +157,8 @@ stable_node_chains_prune_millisecs The effectiveness of KSM and MADV_MERGEABLE is shown in ``/sys/kernel/mm/ksm/``: +general_profit + how effective is KSM. The calculation is explained below. pages_shared how many shared pages are being used pages_sharing @@ -184,6 +184,61 @@ The maximum possible ``pages_sharing/pages_shared`` ratio is limited by the ``max_page_sharing`` tunable. To increase the ratio ``max_page_sharing`` must be increased accordingly. +Monitoring KSM profit +===================== + +KSM can save memory by merging identical pages, but also can consume +additional memory, because it needs to generate a number of rmap_items to +save each scanned page's brief rmap information. Some of these pages may +be merged, but some may not be abled to be merged after being checked +several times, which are unprofitable memory consumed. + +1) How to determine whether KSM save memory or consume memory in system-wide + range? Here is a simple approximate calculation for reference:: + + general_profit =~ pages_sharing * sizeof(page) - (all_rmap_items) * + sizeof(rmap_item); + + where all_rmap_items can be easily obtained by summing ``pages_sharing``, + ``pages_shared``, ``pages_unshared`` and ``pages_volatile``. + +2) The KSM profit inner a single process can be similarly obtained by the + following approximate calculation:: + + process_profit =~ ksm_merging_pages * sizeof(page) - + ksm_rmap_items * sizeof(rmap_item). + + where ksm_merging_pages is shown under the directory ``/proc/<pid>/``, + and ksm_rmap_items is shown in ``/proc/<pid>/ksm_stat``. The process profit + is also shown in ``/proc/<pid>/ksm_stat`` as ksm_process_profit. + +From the perspective of application, a high ratio of ``ksm_rmap_items`` to +``ksm_merging_pages`` means a bad madvise-applied policy, so developers or +administrators have to rethink how to change madvise policy. Giving an example +for reference, a page's size is usually 4K, and the rmap_item's size is +separately 32B on 32-bit CPU architecture and 64B on 64-bit CPU architecture. +so if the ``ksm_rmap_items/ksm_merging_pages`` ratio exceeds 64 on 64-bit CPU +or exceeds 128 on 32-bit CPU, then the app's madvise policy should be dropped, +because the ksm profit is approximately zero or negative. + +Monitoring KSM events +===================== + +There are some counters in /proc/vmstat that may be used to monitor KSM events. +KSM might help save memory, it's a tradeoff by may suffering delay on KSM COW +or on swapping in copy. Those events could help users evaluate whether or how +to use KSM. For example, if cow_ksm increases too fast, user may decrease the +range of madvise(, , MADV_MERGEABLE). + +cow_ksm + is incremented every time a KSM page triggers copy on write (COW) + when users try to write to a KSM page, we have to make a copy. + +ksm_swpin_copy + is incremented every time a KSM page is copied when swapping in + note that KSM page might be copied when swapping in because do_swap_page() + cannot do all the locking needed to reconstitute a cross-anon_vma KSM page. + -- Izik Eidus, Hugh Dickins, 17 Nov 2009 |