kmalloc's API family is critical for mm, with one nature that it will
round up the request size to a fixed one (mostly power of 2). Say
when user requests memory for '2^n + 1' bytes, actually 2^(n+1) bytes
could be allocated, so in worst case, there is around 50% memory
space waste.
The wastage is not a big issue for requests that get allocated/freed
quickly, but may cause problems with objects that have longer life
time.
We've met a kernel boot OOM panic (v5.10), and from the dumped slab
info:
[ 26.062145] kmalloc-2k 814056KB 814056KB
From debug we found there are huge number of 'struct iova_magazine',
whose size is 1032 bytes (1024 + 8), so each allocation will waste
1016 bytes. Though the issue was solved by giving the right (bigger)
size of RAM, it is still nice to optimize the size (either use a
kmalloc friendly size or create a dedicated slab for it).
And from lkml archive, there was another crash kernel OOM case [1]
back in 2019, which seems to be related with the similar slab waste
situation, as the log is similar:
[ 4.332648] iommu: Adding device 0000:20:02.0 to group 16
[ 4.338946] swapper/0 invoked oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x6040c0(GFP_KERNEL|__GFP_COMP), nodemask=(null), order=0, oom_score_adj=0
...
[ 4.857565] kmalloc-2048 59164KB 59164KB
The crash kernel only has 256M memory, and 59M is pretty big here.
(Note: the related code has been changed and optimised in recent
kernel [2], these logs are just picked to demo the problem, also
a patch changing its size to 1024 bytes has been merged)
So add an way to track each kmalloc's memory waste info, and
leverage the existing SLUB debug framework (specifically
SLUB_STORE_USER) to show its call stack of original allocation,
so that user can evaluate the waste situation, identify some hot
spots and optimize accordingly, for a better utilization of memory.
The waste info is integrated into existing interface:
'/sys/kernel/debug/slab/kmalloc-xx/alloc_traces', one example of
'kmalloc-4k' after boot is:
126 ixgbe_alloc_q_vector+0xbe/0x830 [ixgbe] waste=233856/1856 age=280763/281414/282065 pid=1330 cpus=32 nodes=1
__kmem_cache_alloc_node+0x11f/0x4e0
__kmalloc_node+0x4e/0x140
ixgbe_alloc_q_vector+0xbe/0x830 [ixgbe]
ixgbe_init_interrupt_scheme+0x2ae/0xc90 [ixgbe]
ixgbe_probe+0x165f/0x1d20 [ixgbe]
local_pci_probe+0x78/0xc0
work_for_cpu_fn+0x26/0x40
...
which means in 'kmalloc-4k' slab, there are 126 requests of
2240 bytes which got a 4KB space (wasting 1856 bytes each
and 233856 bytes in total), from ixgbe_alloc_q_vector().
And when system starts some real workload like multiple docker
instances, there could are more severe waste.
[1]. https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/8/12/266
[2]. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2920df89-9975-5785-f79b-257d3052dfaf@huawei.com/
[Thanks Hyeonggon for pointing out several bugs about sorting/format]
[Thanks Vlastimil for suggesting way to reduce memory usage of
orig_size and keep it only for kmalloc objects]
Signed-off-by: Feng Tang <feng.tang@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Hyeonggon Yoo <42.hyeyoo@gmail.com>
Cc: Robin Murphy <robin.murphy@arm.com>
Cc: John Garry <john.garry@huawei.com>
Cc: Kefeng Wang <wangkefeng.wang@huawei.com>
Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
6edf2576a6