The rule is:
- high overhead: red
- mid overhead: green
- low overhead: normal (white/black)
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
This patch adds support for profiling JIT generated code to 'perf
report'. A JIT compiler is required to generate a "/tmp/perf-$PID.map"
symbols map that is parsed when looking and displaying symbols.
Thanks to Peter Zijlstra for his help with this patch!
Example "perf report" output with the Jato JIT:
#
# (40311 samples)
#
# Overhead Command Shared Object Symbol
# ........ ................ ......................... ......
#
97.80% jato /tmp/perf-11915.map [.] Fibonacci.fib(I)I
0.56% jato 00000000b7fa023b 0x000000b7fa023b
0.45% jato /tmp/perf-11915.map [.] Fibonacci.main([Ljava/lang/String;)V
0.38% jato [kernel] [k] get_page_from_freelist
0.06% jato [kernel] [k] kunmap_atomic
0.05% jato ./jato [.] utf8Hash
0.04% jato ./jato [.] executeJava
0.04% jato ./jato [.] defineClass
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl
Cc: acme@redhat.com
LKML-Reference: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0906082111590.12407@melkki.cs.Helsinki.FI>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Some JIT compilers allocate memory for generated code with
posix_memalign() + mprotect() so we need to hook into mprotect()
to make sure 'perf' is aware that we're executing code in
anonymous memory.
[ penberg@cs.helsinki.fi: move the hook to sys_mprotect() ]
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
LKML-Reference: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0906082111030.12407@melkki.cs.Helsinki.FI>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Fill in amd_hw_cache_event_id[] with the AMD CPU specific events,
for family 0x0f, 0x10 and 0x11.
There's apparently no distinction between load and store events, so
we only fill in the load events.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Standardize and tidy up all the messages we print during
perfcounter initialization.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Fill in core2_hw_cache_event_id[] with the Atom model specific events.
The events can be used in all the tools via the -e (--event) parameter,
for example "-e l1-misses" or -"-e l2-accesses" or "-e l2-write-misses".
( Note: these are straight from the Intel manuals - not tested yet.)
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Fill in core2_hw_cache_event_id[] with the Core2 model specific events.
The events can be used in all the tools via the -e (--event) parameter,
for example "-e l1-misses" or -"-e l2-accesses" or "-e l2-write-misses".
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Before:
$ perf report
failed to open file: No such file or directory
After:
$ perf report
failed to open file: perf.data (try 'perf record' first)
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
If perf is run on a !CONFIG_PERF_COUNTER kernel right now it
bails out with no messages or with confusing messages.
Standardize this case some more and explain the situation.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
On architectures/CPUs without PMU support but with perfcounters
enabled 'perf record' currently fails because it cannot create a
cycle based hw-perfcounter.
Fall back to the cpu-clock-tick sw-perfcounter in this case, which
is hrtimer based and will always work (as long as perfcounters
are enabled).
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
On architectures/CPUs without PMU support but with perfcounters
enabled 'perf top' currently fails because it cannot create a
cycle based hw-perfcounter.
Fall back to the cpu-clock-tick sw-perfcounter in this case, which
is hrtimer based and will always work (as long as perfcounters
is enabled).
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Before:
$ perf stat ~/hackbench 5
error: syscall returned with -1 (No such device)
After:
$ perf stat ~/hackbench 5
Time: 1.640
Performance counter stats for '/home/mingo/hackbench 5':
6524.570382 task-clock-ticks # 3.838 CPU utilization factor
35704 context-switches # 0.005 M/sec
191 CPU-migrations # 0.000 M/sec
8958 page-faults # 0.001 M/sec
<not counted> cycles
<not counted> instructions
<not counted> cache-references
<not counted> cache-misses
Wall-clock time elapsed: 1699.999995 msecs
Also add -v (--verbose) option to allow the printing of failed
counter opens.
Plus dont print 'inf' if wall-time is zero (due to jiffies granularity),
instead skip the printing of the CPU utilization factor.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
The first snapshot reading often occur before any events have
been read in the mapped perfcounter files.
Just wait until we have at least one event before starting the
snapshot, or the delay before the first set of entries to be
displayed may be long in case of low refresh rate.
Note: we could also use a semaphore to wait before
"print_entries" number of eveents is reached, but again this
value is tunable and we can't ensure we will even reach it.
Also we could base on a default mimimum set of entries for the
first refresh, say 15, but again, the minimal sample is
tunable, and we could end up displaying nothing until we have a
minimal default set of events, which can take some time in case
of high samples filters.
Hence this simple solution which partially covers the default
case.
[ Impact: fix display artifacts in perf top ]
Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbeec@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Corey Ashford <cjashfor@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <1244322643-6447-1-git-send-email-fweisbec@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Arjan noticed this bug in the perf annotate help output:
-s, --symbol <file> symbol to annotate
that should be <symbol> instead.
Reported-by: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
the "perf report" utility crashed in some circumstances
because the "sym" stack variable was not initialized before used
(as also proven by valgrind).
With this fix both the crash goes away and valgrind no longer complains.
Signed-off-by: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Right now kernel debug info does not get resolved by default, because
we dont know where to look for the vmlinux.
The -k option can be used for that - but if no option is given, pick
up vmlinux files in the current directory - in case a kernel hacker
runs profiling from the source directory that the kernel was built in.
The real solution would be to embedd the location (and perhaps the
date/timestamp) of the vmlinux file in /proc/kallsyms, so that
tools can pick it up automatically.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
gcc warned about this bug:
util/parse-events.c: In function ‘parse_generic_hw_symbols’:
util/parse-events.c:175: warning: comparison is always false due to limited range of data type
util/parse-events.c:182: warning: comparison is always false due to limited range of data type
util/parse-events.c:190: warning: comparison is always false due to limited range of data type
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Several people have suggested that 'perf' has become a full-fledged
tool that should be moved out of Documentation/. Move it to the
(new) tools/ directory.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Prepare for the 'perf annotate' implementation by splitting off
builtin-annotate.c from builtin-report.c.
( We keep this commit separate to ease the later librarization
of the facilities that perf-report and perf-annotate shares. )
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Also fix a misalignment in usage string printing.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Also add perf list to command-list.txt.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Also update other areas of the help texts.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Also standardize the cache printout (so that it can be pasted back
into the command) and sort out the aliases.
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Corey Ashford <cjashfor@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
perf list: List all the available event types which can be used in
-e (--event) options.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Extend generic event enumeration with the PERF_TYPE_HW_CACHE
method.
This is a 3-dimensional space:
{ L1-D, L1-I, L2, ITLB, DTLB, BPU } x
{ load, store, prefetch } x
{ accesses, misses }
User-space passes in the 3 coordinates and the kernel provides
a counter. (if the hardware supports that type and if the
combination makes sense.)
Combinations that make no sense produce a -EINVAL.
Combinations that are not supported by the hardware produce -ENOTSUP.
Extend the tools to deal with this, and rewrite the event symbol
parsing code with various popular aliases for the units and
access methods above. So 'l1-cache-miss' and 'l1d-read-ops' are
both valid aliases.
( x86 is supported for now, with the Nehalem event table filled in,
and with Core2 and Atom having placeholder tables. )
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Corey Ashford <cjashfor@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Counter type is a frequently used value and we do a lot of
bit juggling by encoding and decoding it from attr->config.
Clean this up by creating a separate attr->type field.
Also clean up the various similarly complex user-space bits
all around counter attribute management.
The net improvement is significant, and it will be easier
to add a new major type (which is what triggered this cleanup).
(This changes the ABI, all tools are adapted.)
(PowerPC build-tested.)
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Corey Ashford <cjashfor@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
If perf top is executed with a zero value for the refresh rate,
we get a division by zero exception while computing samples_per_sec.
Also a zero refresh rate is not possible, neither do we want to
accept negative values.
[ Impact: fix division by zero in perf top ]
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Corey Ashford <cjashfor@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
LKML-Reference: <1244223061-5399-1-git-send-email-fweisbec@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
To allow the debugging of frequency-adjusting counters, sample
those adjustments and display them in perf report -D.
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
In order to allow easy tracking of the period, also provide means of
adding it to the sample data.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
The purpose of PERF_SAMPLE_CONFIG was to identify the counters,
since then we've added counter ids, use those instead.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Turns out that neither PowerPC nor older x86 compilers know this switch
...
and since it does not make a measurable difference, just omit it.
Reported-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Reported-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
A number of places said 'events' while they should say 'samples'.
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
In order to deal with [vdso] maps generalize the ip->symbol path
a bit and allow to override some bits with custom functions.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
In order to track the vdso also generate mmap events for
install_special_mapping().
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
In order to make arch_vma_name() work from inside
install_special_mapping() we need to set the context.vdso
before calling it.
( This is needed for performance counters to be able to track
this special executable area. )
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Support frequency-based profiling and make it the default.
(Also add a Hz printout in perf top.)
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <new-submission>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Otherwise the code does not compile on 32-bit boxes.
builtin-report.c: In function 'map__fprintf':
builtin-report.c:240: error: format '%lx' expects type 'long unsigned int', but argument 3 has type 'uint64_t'
builtin-report.c:240: error: format '%lx' expects type 'long unsigned int', but argument 4 has type 'uint64_t'
builtin-report.c:240: error: format '%lx' expects type 'long unsigned int', but argument 5 has type 'uint64_t'
Signed-off-by: Yong Wang <yong.y.wang@intel.com>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <20090605033735.GA20451@ywang-moblin2.bj.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Commit 8e3747c1 ("perf_counter: Change data head from u32 to u64")
changed the type of 'head' in struct perf_mmap_data from atomic_t
to atomic_long_t, but missed converting one use of atomic_read on
it to atomic_long_read. The effect of using atomic_read rather than
atomic_long_read on powerpc (and other big-endian architectures) is
that we get the high half of the 64-bit quantity, resulting in the
cmpxchg retry loop in perf_output_begin spinning forever as soon as
data->head becomes non-zero. On little-endian architectures such as
x86 we would get the low half, resulting in a lockup once data->head
becomes greater than 4G.
This fixes it by using atomic_long_read rather than atomic_read.
[ Impact: fix perfcounter lockup on PowerPC / big-endian systems ]
Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
LKML-Reference: <18984.33964.21541.743096@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
* 'drm-fixes' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/airlied/drm-2.6:
drm: ignore EDID with really tiny modes.
drm: don't associate _DRM_DRIVER maps with a master
drm/i915: intel_lvds.c fix section mismatch
drm: Hook up DPMS property handling in drm_crtc.c. Add drm_helper_connector_dpms.
drm: set permissions on edid file to 0444
drm: add newlines to text sysfs files
drm/radeon: fix ring free alignment calculations
drm: fix irq naming for kms drivers.
While running 20 parallel instances of dd as follows:
#!/bin/bash
for i in `seq 1 20`; do
dd if=/dev/zero of=/export/hda3/dd_$i bs=1073741824 count=1 &
done
wait
on a 16G machine, we noticed that rather than just killing the processes,
the entire kernel went down. Stracing dd reveals that it first does an
mmap2, which makes 1GB worth of zero page mappings. Then it performs a
read on those pages from /dev/zero, and finally it performs a write.
The machine died during the reads. Looking at the code, it was noticed
that /dev/zero's read operation had been changed by
557ed1fa26 ("remove ZERO_PAGE") from giving
zero page mappings to actually zeroing the page.
The zeroing of the pages causes physical pages to be allocated to the
process. But, when the process exhausts all the memory that it can, the
kernel cannot kill it, as it is still in the kernel mode allocating more
memory. Consequently, the kernel eventually crashes.
To fix this, I propose that when a fatal signal is pending during
/dev/zero read operation, we simply return and let the user process die.
Signed-off-by: Salman Qazi <sqazi@google.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
[ Modified error return and comment trivially. - Linus]
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
