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Patch series "alloc_tag: introduce IOCTL-based filtering for MAP", v8. Currently, memory allocation profiling data is primarily exposed through /proc/allocinfo. While useful for manual inspection, this text-based interface poses challenges for production monitoring and large-scale analysis: 1. Userspace must parse large amounts of text to extract specific fields. 2. To find specific tags, userspace must read the entire dataset, requiring many context switches and high data copying. 3. The kernel currently aggregates per-CPU counters for every allocation size, even those the user intends to filter out immediately. This series introduces a new IOCTL-based binary interface for allocinfo that supports kernel-side filtering. By allowing the user to specify a filter mask, we significantly reduce the work performed in-kernel and the amount of data transferred to userspace. The IOCTL mechanism was chosen for allocinfo to address the per-CPU counter aggregation bottleneck. A traditional read() operation must report the total allocation count and sizes for every code tag in the system. Doing so requires iterating across all CPUs to sum their per-CPU counters for thousands of tags, which introduces substantial runtime overhead. The IOCTL interface allows userspace to push selective filtering criteria directly into the kernel before the per-CPU counter aggregation. The kernel aggregates per-CPU counters only for a small subset of tags that match the filter. This results in significant performance improvement. Beyond fast filtered retrieval, the IOCTL foundation allows introducing a context capture mechanism in the future to capture the context for specific allocations. Performance measurements were conducted on an Intel Xeon Platinum 8481C (224 CPUs) with caches dropped before each run. The IOCTL mechanism shows a ~20x performance improvement for filtered queries. The kernel avoids the expensive per-CPU counter aggregation (alloc_tag_read) for any tags that fail the initial string or location filters. Scenario 1: Specific File Filtering (arch/x86/events/rapl.c) 1. Traditional (cat /proc/allocinfo | grep): 22ms (sys) 2. IOCTL Interface: 1ms (sys) Scenario 2: Compound Filtering (Filename + Size) 1. Traditional: (cat ... | grep | awk): 21ms (sys) 2. IOCTL Interface: 1ms (sys) Scenario 3: Size-Based Filtering (min_size = 1MB) 1. Traditional: (cat ... | awk): 21ms (sys) 2. IOCTL Interface: 14ms (sys) This patch (of 6): Add the following ioctl commands for /proc/allocinfo file: ALLOCINFO_IOC_CONTENT_ID - gets content identifier which can be used to check whether the file content has changed specifically due to module load/unload. Every time a module is loaded / unloaded, the returned value will be different. By comparing the identifier value at the beginning and at the end of the content retrieval operation, users can validate retrieved information for consistency. ALLOCINFO_IOC_GET_AT - gets the record at the specified position. This is the position of a record in /proc/allocinfo. ALLOCINFO_IOC_GET_NEXT - gets the record next to the last retrieved one. If no records were previously retrieved, returns the first record. Note, function file and module names often have the same prefixes, therefore when filtering for them, we compare the last 64 characters to minimize the chances of name collisions. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: include compat.h, per Suren] Closes: https://lore.kernel.org/oe-kbuild-all/202607091820.qbjlGhKK-lkp@intel.com/ Link: https://lore.kernel.org/cover.1783532853.git.abhishekbapat@google.com Link: https://lore.kernel.org/15596de2607ef13e7c77c6d74763f4ae992ec475.1783532853.git.abhishekbapat@google.com Signed-off-by: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com> Signed-off-by: Abhishek Bapat <abhishekbapat@google.com> Acked-by: Hao Ge <hao.ge@linux.dev> Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> Cc: Kent Overstreet <kent.overstreet@linux.dev> Cc: Sourav Panda <souravpanda@google.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
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