Re: [PATCH 00/40] Memory allocation profiling

On Wed, May 03, 2023 at 06:35:49AM -1000, Tejun Heo wrote:

Hello, Kent.

On Wed, May 03, 2023 at 04:05:08AM -0400, Kent Overstreet wrote:

quoted

No, we're still waiting on the tracing people to _demonstrate_, not
claim, that this is at all possible in a comparable way with tracing. 

So, we (meta) happen to do stuff like this all the time in the fleet to hunt
down tricky persistent problems like memory leaks, ref leaks, what-have-you.
In recent kernels, with kprobe and BPF, our ability to debug these sorts of
problems has improved a great deal. Below, I'm attaching a bcc script I used
to hunt down, IIRC, a double vfree. It's not exactly for a leak but leaks
can follow the same pattern.

There are of course some pros and cons to this approach:

Pros:

* The framework doesn't really have any runtime overhead, so we can have it
  deployed in the entire fleet and debug wherever problem is.

* It's fully flexible and programmable which enables non-trivial filtering
  and summarizing to be done inside kernel w/ BPF as necessary, which is
  pretty handy for tracking high frequency events.

* BPF is pretty performant. Dedicated built-in kernel code can do better of
  course but BPF's jit compiled code & its data structures are fast enough.
  I don't remember any time this was a problem.

Cons:

* BPF has some learning curve. Also the fact that what it provides is a wide
  open field rather than something scoped out for a specific problem can
  make it seem a bit daunting at the beginning.

* Because tracking starts when the script starts running, it doesn't know
  anything which has happened upto that point, so you gotta pay attention to
  handling e.g. handling frees which don't match allocs. It's kinda annoying
  but not a huge problem usually. There are ways to build in BPF progs into
  the kernel and load it early but I haven't experiemnted with it yet
  personally.

I'm not necessarily against adding dedicated memory debugging mechanism but
do wonder whether the extra benefits would be enough to justify the code and
maintenance overhead.

Oh, a bit of delta but for anyone who's more interested in debugging
problems like this, while I tend to go for bcc
(https://github.com/iovisor/bcc) for this sort of problems. Others prefer to
write against libbpf directly or use bpftrace
(https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace).

Do you have example output?

TBH I'm skeptical that it's even possible to do full memory allocation
profiling with tracing/bpf, due to recursive memory allocations and
needing an index of outstanding allcations.