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page owner: Tracking about who allocated each page
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Introduction
============
page owner is for the tracking about who allocated each page.
It can be used to debug memory leak or to find a memory hogger.
When allocation happens, information about allocation such as call stack
and order of pages is stored into certain storage for each page.
When we need to know about status of all pages, we can get and analyze
this information.
Although we already have tracepoint for tracing page allocation/free,
using it for analyzing who allocate each page is rather complex. We need
to enlarge the trace buffer for preventing overlapping until userspace
program launched. And, launched program continually dump out the trace
buffer for later analysis and it would change system behaviour with more
possibility rather than just keeping it in memory, so bad for debugging.
page owner can also be used for various purposes. For example, accurate
fragmentation statistics can be obtained through gfp flag information of
each page. It is already implemented and activated if page owner is
enabled. Other usages are more than welcome.
It can also be used to show all the stacks and their current number of
allocated base pages, which gives us a quick overview of where the memory
is going without the need to screen through all the pages and match the
allocation and free operation.
page owner is disabled by default. So, if you'd like to use it, you need
to add "page_owner=on" to your boot cmdline. If the kernel is built
with page owner and page owner is disabled in runtime due to not enabling
boot option, runtime overhead is marginal. If disabled in runtime, it
doesn't require memory to store owner information, so there is no runtime
memory overhead. And, page owner inserts just two unlikely branches into
the page allocator hotpath and if not enabled, then allocation is done
like as the kernel without page owner. These two unlikely branches should
not affect to allocation performance, especially if the static keys jump
label patching functionality is available. Following is the kernel's code
size change due to this facility.
Although enabling page owner increases kernel size by several kilobytes,
most of this code is outside page allocator and its hot path. Building
the kernel with page owner and turning it on if needed would be great
option to debug kernel memory problem.
There is one notice that is caused by implementation detail. page owner
stores information into the memory from struct page extension. This memory
is initialized some time later than that page allocator starts in sparse
memory system, so, until initialization, many pages can be allocated and
they would have no owner information. To fix it up, these early allocated
pages are investigated and marked as allocated in initialization phase.
Although it doesn't mean that they have the right owner information,
at least, we can tell whether the page is allocated or not,
more accurately. On 2GB memory x86-64 VM box, 13343 early allocated pages
are caught and marked, although they are mostly allocated from struct
page extension feature. Anyway, after that, no page is left in
un-tracking state.
Usage
=====
1) Build user-space helper::
cd tools/mm
make page_owner_sort
2) Enable page owner: add "page_owner=on" to boot cmdline.
3) Do the job that you want to debug.
4) Analyze information from page owner::
cat /sys/kernel/debug/page_owner_stacks/show_stacks > stacks.txt
cat stacks.txt
post_alloc_hook+0x177/0x1a0
get_page_from_freelist+0xd01/0xd80
__alloc_pages+0x39e/0x7e0
allocate_slab+0xbc/0x3f0
___slab_alloc+0x528/0x8a0
kmem_cache_alloc+0x224/0x3b0
sk_prot_alloc+0x58/0x1a0
sk_alloc+0x32/0x4f0
inet_create+0x427/0xb50
__sock_create+0x2e4/0x650
inet_ctl_sock_create+0x30/0x180
igmp_net_init+0xc1/0x130
ops_init+0x167/0x410
setup_net+0x304/0xa60
copy_net_ns+0x29b/0x4a0
create_new_namespaces+0x4a1/0x820
nr_base_pages: 16
...
...
echo 7000 > /sys/kernel/debug/page_owner_stacks/count_threshold
cat /sys/kernel/debug/page_owner_stacks/show_stacks> stacks_7000.txt
cat stacks_7000.txt
post_alloc_hook+0x177/0x1a0
get_page_from_freelist+0xd01/0xd80
__alloc_pages+0x39e/0x7e0
alloc_pages_mpol+0x22e/0x490
folio_alloc+0xd5/0x110
filemap_alloc_folio+0x78/0x230
page_cache_ra_order+0x287/0x6f0
filemap_get_pages+0x517/0x1160
filemap_read+0x304/0x9f0
xfs_file_buffered_read+0xe6/0x1d0 [xfs]
xfs_file_read_iter+0x1f0/0x380 [xfs]
__kernel_read+0x3b9/0x730
kernel_read_file+0x309/0x4d0
__do_sys_finit_module+0x381/0x730
do_syscall_64+0x8d/0x150
entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x62/0x6a
nr_base_pages: 20824
...
cat /sys/kernel/debug/page_owner > page_owner_full.txt
./page_owner_sort page_owner_full.txt sorted_page_owner.txt
The general output of ``page_owner_full.txt`` is as follows::
Page allocated via order XXX, ...
PFN XXX ...
// Detailed stack
Page allocated via order XXX, ...
PFN XXX ...
// Detailed stack
By default, it will do full pfn dump, to start with a given pfn,
page_owner supports fseek.
FILE *fp = fopen("/sys/kernel/debug/page_owner", "r");
fseek(fp, pfn_start, SEEK_SET);
The ``page_owner_sort`` tool ignores ``PFN`` rows, puts the remaining rows
in buf, uses regexp to extract the page order value, counts the times
and pages of buf, and finally sorts them according to the parameter(s).
See the result about who allocated each page
in the ``sorted_page_owner.txt``. General output::
XXX times, XXX pages:
Page allocated via order XXX, ...
// Detailed stack
By default, ``page_owner_sort`` is sorted according to the times of buf.
If you want to sort by the page nums of buf, use the ``-m`` parameter.
The detailed parameters are:
fundamental function::
Sort:
-a Sort by memory allocation time.
-m Sort by total memory.
-p Sort by pid.
-P Sort by tgid.
-n Sort by task command name.
-r Sort by memory release time.
-s Sort by stack trace.
-t Sort by times (default).
--sort <order> Specify sorting order. Sorting syntax is [+|-]key[,[+|-]key[,...]].
Choose a key from the **STANDARD FORMAT SPECIFIERS** section. The "+" is
optional since default direction is increasing numerical or lexicographic
order. Mixed use of abbreviated and complete-form of keys is allowed.
Examples:
./page_owner_sort <input> <output> --sort=n,+pid,-tgid
./page_owner_sort <input> <output> --sort=at
additional function::
Cull:
--cull <rules>
Specify culling rules.Culling syntax is key[,key[,...]].Choose a
multi-letter key from the **STANDARD FORMAT SPECIFIERS** section.
<rules> is a single argument in the form of a comma-separated list,
which offers a way to specify individual culling rules. The recognized
keywords are described in the **STANDARD FORMAT SPECIFIERS** section below.
<rules> can be specified by the sequence of keys k1,k2, ..., as described in
the STANDARD SORT KEYS section below. Mixed use of abbreviated and
complete-form of keys is allowed.
Examples:
./page_owner_sort <input> <output> --cull=stacktrace
./page_owner_sort <input> <output> --cull=st,pid,name
./page_owner_sort <input> <output> --cull=n,f
Filter:
-f Filter out the information of blocks whose memory has been released.
Select:
--pid <pidlist> Select by pid. This selects the blocks whose process ID
numbers appear in <pidlist>.
--tgid <tgidlist> Select by tgid. This selects the blocks whose thread
group ID numbers appear in <tgidlist>.
--name <cmdlist> Select by task command name. This selects the blocks whose
task command name appear in <cmdlist>.
<pidlist>, <tgidlist>, <cmdlist> are single arguments in the form of a comma-separated list,
which offers a way to specify individual selecting rules.
Examples:
./page_owner_sort <input> <output> --pid=1
./page_owner_sort <input> <output> --tgid=1,2,3
./page_owner_sort <input> <output> --name name1,name2
STANDARD FORMAT SPECIFIERS
==========================
::
For --sort option:
KEY LONG DESCRIPTION
p pid process ID
tg tgid thread group ID
n name task command name
st stacktrace stack trace of the page allocation
T txt full text of block
ft free_ts timestamp of the page when it was released
at alloc_ts timestamp of the page when it was allocated
ator allocator memory allocator for pages
For --cull option:
KEY LONG DESCRIPTION
p pid process ID
tg tgid thread group ID
n name task command name
f free whether the page has been released or not
st stacktrace stack trace of the page allocation
ator allocator memory allocator for pages
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