mm: introduce Data Access MONitor (DAMON)
Patch series "Introduce Data Access MONitor (DAMON)", v34. Introduction ============ DAMON is a data access monitoring framework for the Linux kernel. The core mechanisms of DAMON called 'region based sampling' and 'adaptive regions adjustment' (refer to 'mechanisms.rst' in the 11th patch of this patchset for the detail) make it - accurate (The monitored information is useful for DRAM level memory management. It might not appropriate for Cache-level accuracy, though.), - light-weight (The monitoring overhead is low enough to be applied online while making no impact on the performance of the target workloads.), and - scalable (the upper-bound of the instrumentation overhead is controllable regardless of the size of target workloads.). Using this framework, therefore, several memory management mechanisms such as reclamation and THP can be optimized to aware real data access patterns. Experimental access pattern aware memory management optimization works that incurring high instrumentation overhead will be able to have another try. Though DAMON is for kernel subsystems, it can be easily exposed to the user space by writing a DAMON-wrapper kernel subsystem. Then, user space users who have some special workloads will be able to write personalized tools or applications for deeper understanding and specialized optimizations of their systems. DAMON is also merged in two public Amazon Linux kernel trees that based on v5.4.y[1] and v5.10.y[2]. [1] https://github.com/amazonlinux/linux/tree/amazon-5.4.y/master/mm/damon [2] https://github.com/amazonlinux/linux/tree/amazon-5.10.y/master/mm/damon The userspace tool[1] is available, released under GPLv2, and actively being maintained. I am also planning to implement another basic user interface in perf[2]. Also, the basic test suite for DAMON is available under GPLv2[3]. [1] https://github.com/awslabs/damo [2] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20210107120729.22328-1-sjpark@amazon.com/ [3] https://github.com/awslabs/damon-tests Long-term Plan -------------- DAMON is a part of a project called Data Access-aware Operating System (DAOS). As the name implies, I want to improve the performance and efficiency of systems using fine-grained data access patterns. The optimizations are for both kernel and user spaces. I will therefore modify or create kernel subsystems, export some of those to user space and implement user space library / tools. Below shows the layers and components for the project. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Primitives: PTE Accessed bit, PG_idle, rmap, (Intel CMT), ... Framework: DAMON Features: DAMOS, virtual addr, physical addr, ... Applications: DAMON-debugfs, (DARC), ... ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ KERNEL SPACE ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Raw Interface: debugfs, (sysfs), (damonfs), tracepoints, (sys_damon), ... vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv USER SPACE vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv Library: (libdamon), ... Tools: DAMO, (perf), ... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The components in parentheses or marked as '...' are not implemented yet but in the future plan. IOW, those are the TODO tasks of DAOS project. For more detail, please refer to the plans: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20201202082731.24828-1-sjpark@amazon.com/ Evaluations =========== We evaluated DAMON's overhead, monitoring quality and usefulness using 24 realistic workloads on my QEMU/KVM based virtual machine running a kernel that v24 DAMON patchset is applied. DAMON is lightweight. It increases system memory usage by 0.39% and slows target workloads down by 1.16%. DAMON is accurate and useful for memory management optimizations. An experimental DAMON-based operation scheme for THP, namely 'ethp', removes 76.15% of THP memory overheads while preserving 51.25% of THP speedup. Another experimental DAMON-based 'proactive reclamation' implementation, 'prcl', reduces 93.38% of residential sets and 23.63% of system memory footprint while incurring only 1.22% runtime overhead in the best case (parsec3/freqmine). NOTE that the experimental THP optimization and proactive reclamation are not for production but only for proof of concepts. Please refer to the official document[1] or "Documentation/admin-guide/mm: Add a document for DAMON" patch in this patchset for detailed evaluation setup and results. [1] https://damonitor.github.io/doc/html/latest-damon/admin-guide/mm/damon/eval.html Real-world User Story ===================== In summary, DAMON has used on production systems and proved its usefulness. DAMON as a profiler ------------------- We analyzed characteristics of a large scale production systems of our customers using DAMON. The systems utilize 70GB DRAM and 36 CPUs. From this, we were able to find interesting things below. There were obviously different access pattern under idle workload and active workload. Under the idle workload, it accessed large memory regions with low frequency, while the active workload accessed small memory regions with high freuqnecy. DAMON found a 7GB memory region that showing obviously high access frequency under the active workload. We believe this is the performance-effective working set and need to be protected. There was a 4KB memory region that showing highest access frequency under not only active but also idle workloads. We think this must be a hottest code section like thing that should never be paged out. For this analysis, DAMON used only 0.3-1% of single CPU time. Because we used recording-based analysis, it consumed about 3-12 MB of disk space per 20 minutes. This is only small amount of disk space, but we can further reduce the disk usage by using non-recording-based DAMON features. I'd like to argue that only DAMON can do such detailed analysis (finding 4KB highest region in 70GB memory) with the light overhead. DAMON as a system optimization tool ----------------------------------- We also found below potential performance problems on the systems and made DAMON-based solutions. The system doesn't want to make the workload suffer from the page reclamation and thus it utilizes enough DRAM but no swap device. However, we found the system is actively reclaiming file-backed pages, because the system has intensive file IO. The file IO turned out to be not performance critical for the workload, but the customer wanted to ensure performance critical file-backed pages like code section to not mistakenly be evicted. Using direct IO should or `mlock()` would be a straightforward solution, but modifying the user space code is not easy for the customer. Alternatively, we could use DAMON-based operation scheme[1]. By using it, we can ask DAMON to track access frequency of each region and make 'process_madvise(MADV_WILLNEED)[2]' call for regions having specific size and access frequency for a time interval. We also found the system is having high number of TLB misses. We tried 'always' THP enabled policy and it greatly reduced TLB misses, but the page reclamation also been more frequent due to the THP internal fragmentation caused memory bloat. We could try another DAMON-based operation scheme that applies 'MADV_HUGEPAGE' to memory regions having >=2MB size and high access frequency, while applying 'MADV_NOHUGEPAGE' to regions having <2MB size and low access frequency. We do not own the systems so we only reported the analysis results and possible optimization solutions to the customers. The customers satisfied about the analysis results and promised to try the optimization guides. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20201006123931.5847-1-sjpark@amazon.com/ [2] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-api/20200622192900.22757-4-minchan@kernel.org/ Comparison with Idle Page Tracking ================================== Idle Page Tracking allows users to set and read idleness of pages using a bitmap file which represents each page with each bit of the file. One recommended usage of it is working set size detection. Users can do that by 1. find PFN of each page for workloads in interest, 2. set all the pages as idle by doing writes to the bitmap file, 3. wait until the workload accesses its working set, and 4. read the idleness of the pages again and count pages became not idle. NOTE: While Idle Page Tracking is for user space users, DAMON is primarily designed for kernel subsystems though it can easily exposed to the user space. Hence, this section only assumes such user space use of DAMON. For what use cases Idle Page Tracking would be better? ------------------------------------------------------ 1. Flexible usecases other than hotness monitoring. Because Idle Page Tracking allows users to control the primitive (Page idleness) by themselves, Idle Page Tracking users can do anything they want. Meanwhile, DAMON is primarily designed to monitor the hotness of each memory region. For this, DAMON asks users to provide sampling interval and aggregation interval. For the reason, there could be some use case that using Idle Page Tracking is simpler. 2. Physical memory monitoring. Idle Page Tracking receives PFN range as input, so natively supports physical memory monitoring. DAMON is designed to be extensible for multiple address spaces and use cases by implementing and using primitives for the given use case. Therefore, by theory, DAMON has no limitation in the type of target address space as long as primitives for the given address space exists. However, the default primitives introduced by this patchset supports only virtual address spaces. Therefore, for physical memory monitoring, you should implement your own primitives and use it, or simply use Idle Page Tracking. Nonetheless, RFC patchsets[1] for the physical memory address space primitives is already available. It also supports user memory same to Idle Page Tracking. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20200831104730.28970-1-sjpark@amazon.com/ For what use cases DAMON is better? ----------------------------------- 1. Hotness Monitoring. Idle Page Tracking let users know only if a page frame is accessed or not. For hotness check, the user should write more code and use more memory. DAMON do that by itself. 2. Low Monitoring Overhead DAMON receives user's monitoring request with one step and then provide the results. So, roughly speaking, DAMON require only O(1) user/kernel context switches. In case of Idle Page Tracking, however, because the interface receives contiguous page frames, the number of user/kernel context switches increases as the monitoring target becomes complex and huge. As a result, the context switch overhead could be not negligible. Moreover, DAMON is born to handle with the monitoring overhead. Because the core mechanism is pure logical, Idle Page Tracking users might be able to implement the mechanism on their own, but it would be time consuming and the user/kernel context switching will still more frequent than that of DAMON. Also, the kernel subsystems cannot use the logic in this case. 3. Page granularity working set size detection. Until v22 of this patchset, this was categorized as the thing Idle Page Tracking could do better, because DAMON basically maintains additional metadata for each of the monitoring target regions. So, in the page granularity working set size detection use case, DAMON would incur (number of monitoring target pages * size of metadata) memory overhead. Size of the single metadata item is about 54 bytes, so assuming 4KB pages, about 1.3% of monitoring target pages will be additionally used. All essential metadata for Idle Page Tracking are embedded in 'struct page' and page table entries. Therefore, in this use case, only one counter variable for working set size accounting is required if Idle Page Tracking is used. There are more details to consider, but roughly speaking, this is true in most cases. However, the situation changed from v23. Now DAMON supports arbitrary types of monitoring targets, which don't use the metadata. Using that, DAMON can do the working set size detection with no additional space overhead but less user-kernel context switch. A first draft for the implementation of monitoring primitives for this usage is available in a DAMON development tree[1]. An RFC patchset for it based on this patchset will also be available soon. Since v24, the arbitrary type support is dropped from this patchset because this patchset doesn't introduce real use of the type. You can still get it from the DAMON development tree[2], though. [1] https://github.com/sjp38/linux/tree/damon/pgidle_hack [2] https://github.com/sjp38/linux/tree/damon/master 4. More future usecases While Idle Page Tracking has tight coupling with base primitives (PG_Idle and page table Accessed bits), DAMON is designed to be extensible for many use cases and address spaces. If you need some special address type or want to use special h/w access check primitives, you can write your own primitives for that and configure DAMON to use those. Therefore, if your use case could be changed a lot in future, using DAMON could be better. Can I use both Idle Page Tracking and DAMON? -------------------------------------------- Yes, though using them concurrently for overlapping memory regions could result in interference to each other. Nevertheless, such use case would be rare or makes no sense at all. Even in the case, the noise would bot be really significant. So, you can choose whatever you want depending on the characteristics of your use cases. More Information ================ We prepared a showcase web site[1] that you can get more information. There are - the official documentations[2], - the heatmap format dynamic access pattern of various realistic workloads for heap area[3], mmap()-ed area[4], and stack[5] area, - the dynamic working set size distribution[6] and chronological working set size changes[7], and - the latest performance test results[8]. [1] https://damonitor.github.io/_index [2] https://damonitor.github.io/doc/html/latest-damon [3] https://damonitor.github.io/test/result/visual/latest/rec.heatmap.0.png.html [4] https://damonitor.github.io/test/result/visual/latest/rec.heatmap.1.png.html [5] https://damonitor.github.io/test/result/visual/latest/rec.heatmap.2.png.html [6] https://damonitor.github.io/test/result/visual/latest/rec.wss_sz.png.html [7] https://damonitor.github.io/test/result/visual/latest/rec.wss_time.png.html [8] https://damonitor.github.io/test/result/perf/latest/html/index.html Baseline and Complete Git Trees =============================== The patches are based on the latest -mm tree, specifically v5.14-rc1-mmots-2021-07-15-18-47 of https://github.com/hnaz/linux-mm. You can also clone the complete git tree: $ git clone git://github.com/sjp38/linux -b damon/patches/v34 The web is also available: https://github.com/sjp38/linux/releases/tag/damon/patches/v34 Development Trees ----------------- There are a couple of trees for entire DAMON patchset series and features for future release. - For latest release: https://github.com/sjp38/linux/tree/damon/master - For next release: https://github.com/sjp38/linux/tree/damon/next Long-term Support Trees ----------------------- For people who want to test DAMON but using LTS kernels, there are another couple of trees based on two latest LTS kernels respectively and containing the 'damon/master' backports. - For v5.4.y: https://github.com/sjp38/linux/tree/damon/for-v5.4.y - For v5.10.y: https://github.com/sjp38/linux/tree/damon/for-v5.10.y Amazon Linux Kernel Trees ------------------------- DAMON is also merged in two public Amazon Linux kernel trees that based on v5.4.y[1] and v5.10.y[2]. [1] https://github.com/amazonlinux/linux/tree/amazon-5.4.y/master/mm/damon [2] https://github.com/amazonlinux/linux/tree/amazon-5.10.y/master/mm/damon Git Tree for Diff of Patches ============================ For easy review of diff between different versions of each patch, I prepared a git tree containing all versions of the DAMON patchset series: https://github.com/sjp38/damon-patches You can clone it and use 'diff' for easy review of changes between different versions of the patchset. For example: $ git clone https://github.com/sjp38/damon-patches && cd damon-patches $ diff -u damon/v33 damon/v34 Sequence Of Patches =================== First three patches implement the core logics of DAMON. The 1st patch introduces basic sampling based hotness monitoring for arbitrary types of targets. Following two patches implement the core mechanisms for control of overhead and accuracy, namely regions based sampling (patch 2) and adaptive regions adjustment (patch 3). Now the essential parts of DAMON is complete, but it cannot work unless someone provides monitoring primitives for a specific use case. The following two patches make it just work for virtual address spaces monitoring. The 4th patch makes 'PG_idle' can be used by DAMON and the 5th patch implements the virtual memory address space specific monitoring primitives using page table Accessed bits and the 'PG_idle' page flag. Now DAMON just works for virtual address space monitoring via the kernel space api. To let the user space users can use DAMON, following four patches add interfaces for them. The 6th patch adds a tracepoint for monitoring results. The 7th patch implements a DAMON application kernel module, namely damon-dbgfs, that simply wraps DAMON and exposes DAMON interface to the user space via the debugfs interface. The 8th patch further exports pid of monitoring thread (kdamond) to user space for easier cpu usage accounting, and the 9th patch makes the debugfs interface to support multiple contexts. Three patches for maintainability follows. The 10th patch adds documentations for both the user space and the kernel space. The 11th patch provides unit tests (based on the kunit) while the 12th patch adds user space tests (based on the kselftest). Finally, the last patch (13th) updates the MAINTAINERS file. This patch (of 13): DAMON is a data access monitoring framework for the Linux kernel. The core mechanisms of DAMON make it - accurate (the monitoring output is useful enough for DRAM level performance-centric memory management; It might be inappropriate for CPU cache levels, though), - light-weight (the monitoring overhead is normally low enough to be applied online), and - scalable (the upper-bound of the overhead is in constant range regardless of the size of target workloads). Using this framework, hence, we can easily write efficient kernel space data access monitoring applications. For example, the kernel's memory management mechanisms can make advanced decisions using this. Experimental data access aware optimization works that incurring high access monitoring overhead could again be implemented on top of this. Due to its simple and flexible interface, providing user space interface would be also easy. Then, user space users who have some special workloads can write personalized applications for better understanding and optimizations of their workloads and systems. === Nevertheless, this commit is defining and implementing only basic access check part without the overhead-accuracy handling core logic. The basic access check is as below. The output of DAMON says what memory regions are how frequently accessed for a given duration. The resolution of the access frequency is controlled by setting ``sampling interval`` and ``aggregation interval``. In detail, DAMON checks access to each page per ``sampling interval`` and aggregates the results. In other words, counts the number of the accesses to each region. After each ``aggregation interval`` passes, DAMON calls callback functions that previously registered by users so that users can read the aggregated results and then clears the results. This can be described in below simple pseudo-code:: init() while monitoring_on: for page in monitoring_target: if accessed(page): nr_accesses[page] += 1 if time() % aggregation_interval == 0: for callback in user_registered_callbacks: callback(monitoring_target, nr_accesses) for page in monitoring_target: nr_accesses[page] = 0 if time() % update_interval == 0: update() sleep(sampling interval) The target regions constructed at the beginning of the monitoring and updated after each ``regions_update_interval``, because the target regions could be dynamically changed (e.g., mmap() or memory hotplug). The monitoring overhead of this mechanism will arbitrarily increase as the size of the target workload grows. The basic monitoring primitives for actual access check and dynamic target regions construction aren't in the core part of DAMON. Instead, it allows users to implement their own primitives that are optimized for their use case and configure DAMON to use those. In other words, users cannot use current version of DAMON without some additional works. Following commits will implement the core mechanisms for the overhead-accuracy control and default primitives implementations. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210716081449.22187-1-sj38.park@gmail.com Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210716081449.22187-2-sj38.park@gmail.com Signed-off-by:SeongJae Park <sjpark@amazon.de> Reviewed-by:
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