mm/page_ext: resurrect struct page extending code for debugging
When we debug something, we'd like to insert some information to every
page. For this purpose, we sometimes modify struct page itself. But,
this has drawbacks. First, it requires re-compile. This makes us
hesitate to use the powerful debug feature so development process is
slowed down. And, second, sometimes it is impossible to rebuild the
kernel due to third party module dependency. At third, system behaviour
would be largely different after re-compile, because it changes size of
struct page greatly and this structure is accessed by every part of
kernel. Keeping this as it is would be better to reproduce errornous
situation.
This feature is intended to overcome above mentioned problems. This
feature allocates memory for extended data per page in certain place
rather than the struct page itself. This memory can be accessed by the
accessor functions provided by this code. During the boot process, it
checks whether allocation of huge chunk of memory is needed or not. If
not, it avoids allocating memory at all. With this advantage, we can
include this feature into the kernel in default and can avoid rebuild and
solve related problems.
Until now, memcg uses this technique. But, now, memcg decides to embed
their variable to struct page itself and it's code to extend struct page
has been removed. I'd like to use this code to develop debug feature, so
this patch resurrect it.
To help these things to work well, this patch introduces two callbacks for
clients. One is the need callback which is mandatory if user wants to
avoid useless memory allocation at boot-time. The other is optional, init
callback, which is used to do proper initialization after memory is
allocated. Detailed explanation about purpose of these functions is in
code comment. Please refer it.
Others are completely same with previous extension code in memcg.
Signed-off-by: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave@sr71.net>
Cc: Michal Nazarewicz <mina86@mina86.com>
Cc: Jungsoo Son <jungsoo.son@lge.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
7 files changed