On Tue, May 02, 2023 at 06:36:07PM -0700, Nhat Pham wrote:

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/ (local)

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

Signed-off-by: Nhat Pham <nphamcs@gmail.com>

Thanks for persisting through the pain. This looks great to me now.

Like I've said before, I think this is sorely needed. The cache is
frequently the biggest memory consumer in the system. We have a rich
API for influencing it, but there is a glaring gap when it comes to
introspection. It's difficult to design control loops without
feedback. This proposes an intuitive, versatile and scalable interface
to bridge that gap, and it integrates nicely with the existing VFS API
for managing the cache. I would love to see this go in.

I'd also love for the `mu' tool you wrote to make it into coreutils
eventually. It would make debugging memory consumption and writeback
issues on live systems, especially with complex and/or multiple
workloads, so much easier.

Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>