Patch series "cachestat: a new syscall for page cache state of files",
v13.

There is currently no good way to query the page cache statistics of large
files and directory trees.  There is mincore(), but it scales poorly: the
kernel writes out a lot of bitmap data that userspace has to aggregate,
when the user really does not care about per-page information in that
case.  The user also needs to mmap and unmap each file as it goes along,
which can be quite slow as well.

Some use cases where this information could come in handy:
  * Allowing database to decide whether to perform an index scan or direct
    table queries based on the in-memory cache state of the index.
  * Visibility into the writeback algorithm, for performance issues
    diagnostic.
  * Workload-aware writeback pacing: estimating IO fulfilled by page cache
    (and IO to be done) within a range of a file, allowing for more
    frequent syncing when and where there is IO capacity, and batching
    when there is not.
  * Computing memory usage of large files/directory trees, analogous to
    the du tool for disk usage.

More information about these use cases could be found in this thread:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230315170934.GA97793@cmpxchg.org/

This series of patches introduces a new system call, cachestat, that
summarizes the page cache statistics (number of cached pages, dirty pages,
pages marked for writeback, evicted pages etc.) of a file, in a specified
range of bytes.  It also include a selftest suite that tests some typical
usage.  Currently, the syscall is only wired in for x86 architecture.

This interface is inspired by past discussion and concerns with fincore,
which has a similar design (and as a result, issues) as mincore.  Relevant
links:

https://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1302.1/04207.html
https://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1302.1/04209.html


I have also developed a small tool that computes the memory usage of files
and directories, analogous to the du utility.  User can choose between
mincore or cachestat (with cachestat exporting more information than
mincore).  To compare the performance of these two options, I benchmarked
the tool on the root directory of a Meta's server machine, each for five
runs:

Using cachestat
real -- Median: 33.377s, Average: 33.475s, Standard Deviation: 0.3602
user -- Median: 4.08s, Average: 4.1078s, Standard Deviation: 0.0742
sys -- Median: 28.823s, Average: 28.8866s, Standard Deviation: 0.2689

Using mincore:
real -- Median: 102.352s, Average: 102.3442s, Standard Deviation: 0.2059
user -- Median: 10.149s, Average: 10.1482s, Standard Deviation: 0.0162
sys -- Median: 91.186s, Average: 91.2084s, Standard Deviation: 0.2046

I also ran both syscalls on a 2TB sparse file:

Using cachestat:
real    0m0.009s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.009s

Using mincore:
real    0m37.510s
user    0m2.934s
sys     0m34.558s

Very large files like this are the pathological case for mincore.  In
fact, to compute the stats for a single 2TB file, mincore takes as long as
cachestat takes to compute the stats for the entire tree!  This could
easily happen inadvertently when we run it on subdirectories.  Mincore is
clearly not suitable for a general-purpose command line tool.

Regarding security concerns, cachestat() should not pose any additional
issues.  The caller already has read permission to the file itself (since
they need an fd to that file to call cachestat).  This means that the
caller can access the underlying data in its entirety, which is a much
greater source of information (and as a result, a much greater security
risk) than the cache status itself.

The latest API change (in v13 of the patch series) is suggested by Jens
Axboe.  It allows for 64-bit length argument, even on 32-bit architecture
(which is previously not possible due to the limit on the number of
syscall arguments).  Furthermore, it eliminates the need for compatibility
handling - every user can use the same ABI.


This patch (of 4):

In preparation for computing recently evicted pages in cachestat, refactor
workingset_refault and lru_gen_refault to expose a helper function that
would test if an evicted page is recently evicted.

[penguin-kernel@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp: add missing rcu_read_unlock() in lru_gen_refault()]
  Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/610781bc-cf11-fc89-a46f-87cb8235d439@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20230503013608.2431726-1-nphamcs@gmail.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20230503013608.2431726-2-nphamcs@gmail.comSigned-off-by: Nhat Pham <nphamcs@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>