Commit cf264e13 authored by Nhat Pham's avatar Nhat Pham Committed by Andrew Morton
Browse files

cachestat: implement cachestat syscall

There is currently no good way to query the page cache state of large file
sets 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 doesn 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 the following
thread:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230315170934.GA97793@cmpxchg.org/

This patch implements a new syscall that queries cache state of a file and
summarizes the number of cached pages, number of dirty pages, number of
pages marked for writeback, number of (recently) evicted pages, etc.  in a
given range.  Currently, the syscall is only wired in for x86
architecture.

NAME
    cachestat - query the page cache statistics of a file.

SYNOPSIS
    #include <sys/mman.h>

    struct cachestat_range {
        __u64 off;
        __u64 len;
    };

    struct cachestat {
        __u64 nr_cache;
        __u64 nr_dirty;
        __u64 nr_writeback;
        __u64 nr_evicted;
        __u64 nr_recently_evicted;
    };

    int cachestat(unsigned int fd, struct cachestat_range *cstat_range,
        struct cachestat *cstat, unsigned int flags);

DESCRIPTION
    cachestat() queries the number of cached pages, number of dirty
    pages, number of pages marked for writeback, number of evicted
    pages, number of recently evicted pages, in the bytes range given by
    `off` and `len`.

    An evicted page is a page that is previously in the page cache but
    has been evicted since. A page is recently evicted if its last
    eviction was recent enough that its reentry to the cache would
    indicate that it is actively being used by the system, and that
    there is memory pressure on the system.

    These values are returned in a cachestat struct, whose address is
    given by the `cstat` argument.

    The `off` and `len` arguments must be non-negative integers. If
    `len` > 0, the queried range is [`off`, `off` + `len`]. If `len` ==
    0, we will query in the range from `off` to the end of the file.

    The `flags` argument is unused for now, but is included for future
    extensibility. User should pass 0 (i.e no flag specified).

    Currently, hugetlbfs is not supported.

    Because the status of a page can change after cachestat() checks it
    but before it returns to the application, the returned values may
    contain stale information.

RETURN VALUE
    On success, cachestat returns 0. On error, -1 is returned, and errno
    is set to indicate the error.

ERRORS
    EFAULT cstat or cstat_args points to an invalid address.

    EINVAL invalid flags.

    EBADF  invalid file descriptor.

    EOPNOTSUPP file descriptor is of a hugetlbfs file

[nphamcs@gmail.com: replace rounddown logic with the existing helper]
  Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20230504022044.3675469-1-nphamcs@gmail.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20230503013608.2431726-3-nphamcs@gmail.com


Signed-off-by: default avatarNhat Pham <nphamcs@gmail.com>
Acked-by: default avatarJohannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Brian Foster <bfoster@redhat.com>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
parent ffcb5f52
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+1 −0
Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -455,3 +455,4 @@
448	i386	process_mrelease	sys_process_mrelease
449	i386	futex_waitv		sys_futex_waitv
450	i386	set_mempolicy_home_node		sys_set_mempolicy_home_node
451	i386	cachestat		sys_cachestat
+1 −0
Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -372,6 +372,7 @@
448	common	process_mrelease	sys_process_mrelease
449	common	futex_waitv		sys_futex_waitv
450	common	set_mempolicy_home_node	sys_set_mempolicy_home_node
451	common	cachestat		sys_cachestat

#
# Due to a historical design error, certain syscalls are numbered differently
+5 −0
Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -72,6 +72,8 @@ struct open_how;
struct mount_attr;
struct landlock_ruleset_attr;
enum landlock_rule_type;
struct cachestat_range;
struct cachestat;

#include <linux/types.h>
#include <linux/aio_abi.h>
@@ -1058,6 +1060,9 @@ asmlinkage long sys_memfd_secret(unsigned int flags);
asmlinkage long sys_set_mempolicy_home_node(unsigned long start, unsigned long len,
					    unsigned long home_node,
					    unsigned long flags);
asmlinkage long sys_cachestat(unsigned int fd,
		struct cachestat_range __user *cstat_range,
		struct cachestat __user *cstat, unsigned int flags);

/*
 * Architecture-specific system calls
+4 −1
Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -886,8 +886,11 @@ __SYSCALL(__NR_futex_waitv, sys_futex_waitv)
#define __NR_set_mempolicy_home_node 450
__SYSCALL(__NR_set_mempolicy_home_node, sys_set_mempolicy_home_node)

#define __NR_cachestat 451
__SYSCALL(__NR_cachestat, sys_cachestat)

#undef __NR_syscalls
#define __NR_syscalls 451
#define __NR_syscalls 452

/*
 * 32 bit systems traditionally used different
+14 −0
Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@

#include <asm/mman.h>
#include <asm-generic/hugetlb_encode.h>
#include <linux/types.h>

#define MREMAP_MAYMOVE		1
#define MREMAP_FIXED		2
@@ -41,4 +42,17 @@
#define MAP_HUGE_2GB	HUGETLB_FLAG_ENCODE_2GB
#define MAP_HUGE_16GB	HUGETLB_FLAG_ENCODE_16GB

struct cachestat_range {
	__u64 off;
	__u64 len;
};

struct cachestat {
	__u64 nr_cache;
	__u64 nr_dirty;
	__u64 nr_writeback;
	__u64 nr_evicted;
	__u64 nr_recently_evicted;
};

#endif /* _UAPI_LINUX_MMAN_H */
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