Re: [PATCH v2 1/1] mm: report per-page metadata information

From: Greg KH
Date: Wed Oct 18 2023 - 03:52:07 EST


On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 05:55:48PM -0700, Sourav Panda wrote:
> Adds a new per-node PageMetadata field to
> /sys/devices/system/node/nodeN/meminfo
> and a global PageMetadata field to /proc/meminfo. This information can
> be used by users to see how much memory is being used by per-page
> metadata, which can vary depending on build configuration, machine
> architecture, and system use.
>
> Per-page metadata is the amount of memory that Linux needs in order to
> manage memory at the page granularity. The majority of such memory is
> used by "struct page" and "page_ext" data structures. In contrast to
> most other memory consumption statistics, per-page metadata might not
> be included in MemTotal. For example, MemTotal does not include memblock
> allocations but includes buddy allocations. While on the other hand,
> per-page metadata would include both memblock and buddy allocations.
>
> This memory depends on build configurations, machine architectures, and
> the way system is used:
>
> Build configuration may include extra fields into "struct page",
> and enable / disable "page_ext"
> Machine architecture defines base page sizes. For example 4K x86,
> 8K SPARC, 64K ARM64 (optionally), etc. The per-page metadata
> overhead is smaller on machines with larger page sizes.
> System use can change per-page overhead by using vmemmap
> optimizations with hugetlb pages, and emulated pmem devdax pages.
> Also, boot parameters can determine whether page_ext is needed
> to be allocated. This memory can be part of MemTotal or be outside
> MemTotal depending on whether the memory was hot-plugged, booted with,
> or hugetlb memory was returned back to the system.
>
> Suggested-by: Pasha Tatashin <pasha.tatashin@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Sourav Panda <souravpanda@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Change-Id: I4351791c9f4c1e9759cbd8e646e808565dbb595f

checkpatch.pl should have said that "Change-Id:" should be removed, why
didn't you run this on your patch before submitting it?

thanks,

greg k-h