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authorLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2022-08-06 02:32:45 +0300
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2022-08-06 02:32:45 +0300
commit6614a3c3164a5df2b54abb0b3559f51041cf705b (patch)
tree1c25c23d9efed988705287fc2ccb78e0e76e311d /Documentation/mm/damon/faq.rst
parent74cae210a335d159f2eb822e261adee905b6951a (diff)
parent360614c01f81f48a89d8b13f8fa69c3ae0a1f5c7 (diff)
downloadlinux-6614a3c3164a5df2b54abb0b3559f51041cf705b.tar.xz
Merge tag 'mm-stable-2022-08-03' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm
Pull MM updates from Andrew Morton: "Most of the MM queue. A few things are still pending. Liam's maple tree rework didn't make it. This has resulted in a few other minor patch series being held over for next time. Multi-gen LRU still isn't merged as we were waiting for mapletree to stabilize. The current plan is to merge MGLRU into -mm soon and to later reintroduce mapletree, with a view to hopefully getting both into 6.1-rc1. Summary: - The usual batches of cleanups from Baoquan He, Muchun Song, Miaohe Lin, Yang Shi, Anshuman Khandual and Mike Rapoport - Some kmemleak fixes from Patrick Wang and Waiman Long - DAMON updates from SeongJae Park - memcg debug/visibility work from Roman Gushchin - vmalloc speedup from Uladzislau Rezki - more folio conversion work from Matthew Wilcox - enhancements for coherent device memory mapping from Alex Sierra - addition of shared pages tracking and CoW support for fsdax, from Shiyang Ruan - hugetlb optimizations from Mike Kravetz - Mel Gorman has contributed some pagealloc changes to improve latency and realtime behaviour. - mprotect soft-dirty checking has been improved by Peter Xu - Many other singleton patches all over the place" [ XFS merge from hell as per Darrick Wong in https://lore.kernel.org/all/YshKnxb4VwXycPO8@magnolia/ ] * tag 'mm-stable-2022-08-03' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm: (282 commits) tools/testing/selftests/vm/hmm-tests.c: fix build mm: Kconfig: fix typo mm: memory-failure: convert to pr_fmt() mm: use is_zone_movable_page() helper hugetlbfs: fix inaccurate comment in hugetlbfs_statfs() hugetlbfs: cleanup some comments in inode.c hugetlbfs: remove unneeded header file hugetlbfs: remove unneeded hugetlbfs_ops forward declaration hugetlbfs: use helper macro SZ_1{K,M} mm: cleanup is_highmem() mm/hmm: add a test for cross device private faults selftests: add soft-dirty into run_vmtests.sh selftests: soft-dirty: add test for mprotect mm/mprotect: fix soft-dirty check in can_change_pte_writable() mm: memcontrol: fix potential oom_lock recursion deadlock mm/gup.c: fix formatting in check_and_migrate_movable_page() xfs: fail dax mount if reflink is enabled on a partition mm/memcontrol.c: remove the redundant updating of stats_flush_threshold userfaultfd: don't fail on unrecognized features hugetlb_cgroup: fix wrong hugetlb cgroup numa stat ...
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+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+==========================
+Frequently Asked Questions
+==========================
+
+Why a new subsystem, instead of extending perf or other user space tools?
+=========================================================================
+
+First, because it needs to be lightweight as much as possible so that it can be
+used online, any unnecessary overhead such as kernel - user space context
+switching cost should be avoided. Second, DAMON aims to be used by other
+programs including the kernel. Therefore, having a dependency on specific
+tools like perf is not desirable. These are the two biggest reasons why DAMON
+is implemented in the kernel space.
+
+
+Can 'idle pages tracking' or 'perf mem' substitute DAMON?
+=========================================================
+
+Idle page tracking is a low level primitive for access check of the physical
+address space. 'perf mem' is similar, though it can use sampling to minimize
+the overhead. On the other hand, DAMON is a higher-level framework for the
+monitoring of various address spaces. It is focused on memory management
+optimization and provides sophisticated accuracy/overhead handling mechanisms.
+Therefore, 'idle pages tracking' and 'perf mem' could provide a subset of
+DAMON's output, but cannot substitute DAMON.
+
+
+Does DAMON support virtual memory only?
+=======================================
+
+No. The core of the DAMON is address space independent. The address space
+specific monitoring operations including monitoring target regions
+constructions and actual access checks can be implemented and configured on the
+DAMON core by the users. In this way, DAMON users can monitor any address
+space with any access check technique.
+
+Nonetheless, DAMON provides vma/rmap tracking and PTE Accessed bit check based
+implementations of the address space dependent functions for the virtual memory
+and the physical memory by default, for a reference and convenient use.
+
+
+Can I simply monitor page granularity?
+======================================
+
+Yes. You can do so by setting the ``min_nr_regions`` attribute higher than the
+working set size divided by the page size. Because the monitoring target
+regions size is forced to be ``>=page size``, the region split will make no
+effect.