On Sat, 12 Feb 2005, Richard F. Rebel wrote: > > That said, many mod_perl users are *VERY* interested in being able to > detect and observe how "shared" our forked children are. Shared meaning > private pages shared with children (copy on write). Is it even possible > to do this in 2.6 kernels? If so, any pointers would be very helpful.
Not in any of the vanilla kernels. Mauricio has a /proc/<pid>/smaps patch, in which he returns to looking at every pte slot of every vma of the process as /proc/<pid>/statm did in 2.4. I suggest you ask him offline for his latest version (the last I saw did not include support for 2.6.11's pud level; and looped in an inefficient way, repeatedly locating, mapping and unmapping the page table for each pte slot - needs refactoring into pgd_range, pud_range, pmd_range, pte_range levels like 2.4's statm). It wouldn't be hard to take his framework (before or after improvements), or the 2.4 proc_pid_statm framework, and modify that to give you the information you're looking for. But I doubt that the resulting patch would be accepted into a vanilla kernel - there's no end to the kinds of numbers that different people might want to see. I wonder how important swapping is in your case. If it's an exceptional case that you can ignore, then a "private shared" entry would be identified by code something like: if (pte_present(pte)) { pfn = pte_pfn(pte); if (pfn_valid(pfn)) { page = pfn_to_page(pfn); if (PageAnon(page) && page_mapcount(page) > 1) private_shared++; } } But if swap use is significant, then it gets rather more complicated: a present page, even when its mapcount is 1, might still be shared with other processes, from which which the pte has been unmapped; and where the pte is not present, there may be a swap entry shared with others. It can be worked out, but awkward and more than a few lines of code. Hugh - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/