• Yosry Ahmed's avatar
    mm: add NR_SECONDARY_PAGETABLE to count secondary page table uses. · ebc97a52
    Yosry Ahmed authored
    We keep track of several kernel memory stats (total kernel memory, page
    tables, stack, vmalloc, etc) on multiple levels (global, per-node,
    per-memcg, etc). These stats give insights to users to how much memory
    is used by the kernel and for what purposes.
    
    Currently, memory used by KVM mmu is not accounted in any of those
    kernel memory stats. This patch series accounts the memory pages
    used by KVM for page tables in those stats in a new
    NR_SECONDARY_PAGETABLE stat. This stat can be later extended to account
    for other types of secondary pages tables (e.g. iommu page tables).
    
    KVM has a decent number of large allocations that aren't for page
    tables, but for most of them, the number/size of those allocations
    scales linearly with either the number of vCPUs or the amount of memory
    assigned to the VM. KVM's secondary page table allocations do not scale
    linearly, especially when nested virtualization is in use.
    
    From a KVM perspective, NR_SECONDARY_PAGETABLE will scale with KVM's
    per-VM pages_{4k,2m,1g} stats unless the guest is doing something
    bizarre (e.g. accessing only 4kb chunks of 2mb pages so that KVM is
    forced to allocate a large number of page tables even though the guest
    isn't accessing that much memory). However, someone would need to either
    understand how KVM works to make that connection, or know (or be told) to
    go look at KVM's stats if they're running VMs to better decipher the stats.
    
    Furthermore, having NR_PAGETABLE side-by-side with NR_SECONDARY_PAGETABLE
    is informative. For example, when backing a VM with THP vs. HugeTLB,
    NR_SECONDARY_PAGETABLE is roughly the same, but NR_PAGETABLE is an order
    of magnitude higher with THP. So having this stat will at the very least
    prove to be useful for understanding tradeoffs between VM backing types,
    and likely even steer folks towards potential optimizations.
    
    The original discussion with more details about the rationale:
    https://lore.kernel.org/all/87ilqoi77b.wl-maz@kernel.org
    
    This stat will be used by subsequent patches to count KVM mmu
    memory usage.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarYosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@google.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarShakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarMarc Zyngier <maz@kernel.org>
    Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20220823004639.2387269-2-yosryahmed@google.comSigned-off-by: default avatarSean Christopherson <seanjc@google.com>
    ebc97a52
page_alloc.c 268 KB