mm: /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh to force vmstat update
Provide /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh to force an immediate update of per-cpu into global vmstats: useful to avoid a sleep(2) or whatever before checking counts when testing. Originally added to work around a bug which left counts stranded indefinitely on a cpu going idle (an inaccuracy magnified when small below-batch numbers represent "huge" amounts of memory), but I believe that bug is now fixed: nonetheless, this is still a useful knob. Its schedule_on_each_cpu() is probably too expensive just to fold into reading /proc/meminfo itself: give this mode 0600 to prevent abuse. Allow a write or a read to do the same: nothing to read, but "grep -h Shmem /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh /proc/meminfo" is convenient. Oh, and since global_page_state() itself is careful to disguise any underflow as 0, hack in an "Invalid argument" and pr_warn() if a counter is negative after the refresh - this helped to fix a misaccounting of NR_ISOLATED_FILE in my migration code. But on recent kernels, I find that NR_ALLOC_BATCH and NR_PAGES_SCANNED often go negative some of the time. I have not yet worked out why, but have no evidence that it's actually harmful. Punt for the moment by just ignoring the anomaly on those. Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Cc: Andres Lagar-Cavilla <andreslc@google.com> Cc: Yang Shi <yang.shi@linaro.org> Cc: Ning Qu <quning@gmail.com> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net> Cc: Andres Lagar-Cavilla <andreslc@google.com> Cc: Konstantin Khlebnikov <koct9i@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Loading
Please register or sign in to comment