Add the explanation of the added ioctl on pagemap file. It can be used to get, clear or both soft-dirty PTE bit of the specified range. or both at the same time.
Signed-off-by: Muhammad Usama Anjum usama.anjum@collabora.com --- Changes in v2: - Update documentation to mention ioctl instead of the syscall --- Documentation/admin-guide/mm/soft-dirty.rst | 42 ++++++++++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 41 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/soft-dirty.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/soft-dirty.rst index cb0cfd6672fa..d3d33e63a965 100644 --- a/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/soft-dirty.rst +++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/mm/soft-dirty.rst @@ -5,7 +5,12 @@ Soft-Dirty PTEs ===============
The soft-dirty is a bit on a PTE which helps to track which pages a task -writes to. In order to do this tracking one should +writes to. + +Using Proc FS +------------- + +In order to do this tracking one should
1. Clear soft-dirty bits from the task's PTEs.
@@ -20,6 +25,41 @@ writes to. In order to do this tracking one should 64-bit qword is the soft-dirty one. If set, the respective PTE was written to since step 1.
+Using IOCTL +----------- + +The IOCTL on the ``/proc/PID/pagemap`` can be can be used to find the dirty pages +atomically. The following commands are supported:: + + MEMWATCH_SD_GET + Get the page offsets which are soft dirty. + + MEMWATCH_SD_CLEAR + Clear the pages which are soft dirty. + + MEMWATCH_SD_GET_AND_CLEAR + Get and clear the pages which are soft dirty. + +The struct :c:type:`pagemap_sd_args` is used as the argument. In this struct: + + 1. The range is specified through start and len. The len argument need not be + the multiple of the page size, but since the information is returned for the + whole pages, len is effectively rounded up to the next multiple of the page + size. + + 2. The output buffer and size is specified in vec and vec_len. The offsets of + the dirty pages from start are returned in vec. The ioctl returns when the + whole range has been searched or vec is completely filled. The whole range + isn't cleared if vec fills up completely. + + 3. The flags can be specified in flags field. Currently only one flag, + PAGEMAP_SD_NO_REUSED_REGIONS is supported which can be specified to ignore + the VMA dirty flags for better performance. This flag shows only those pages + dirty which have been written to by the user. All new allocations aren't returned + to be dirty. + +Explanation +-----------
Internally, to do this tracking, the writable bit is cleared from PTEs when the soft-dirty bit is cleared. So, after this, when the task tries to