Re: [PATCH 5/5] proc: export more page flags in /proc/kpageflags

[Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>]

On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 11:11 -0700, Tony Luck wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 1:33 AM, Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com> wrote:
> > 1) FAST
> >
> > It takes merely 0.2s to scan 4GB pages:
> >
> >        ./page-types  0.02s user 0.20s system 99% cpu 0.216 total
> 
> OK on a tiny system ... but sounds painful on a big
> server. 0.2s for 4G scales up to 3 minutes 25 seconds
> on a 4TB system (4TB systems were being sold two
> years ago ... so by now the high end will have moved
> up to 8TB or perhaps 16TB).
> 
> Would the resulting output be anything but noise on
> a big system (a *lot* of pages can change state in
> 3 minutes)?

Bah. The rate of change is proportional to #cpus, not #pages. Assuming
you've got 1024 processors, you could run the scan in parallel in .2
seconds still.

It won't be an atomic snapshot, obviously. But stopping the whole
machine on a system that size is probably not what you want anyway.

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