About Kernel Documentation Linux Kernel Contact Linux Resources Linux Blog

Documentation / vm / soft-dirty.txt


Based on kernel version 4.16.1. Page generated on 2018-04-09 11:53 EST.

1	                            SOFT-DIRTY PTEs
2	
3	  The soft-dirty is a bit on a PTE which helps to track which pages a task
4	writes to. In order to do this tracking one should
5	
6	  1. Clear soft-dirty bits from the task's PTEs.
7	
8	     This is done by writing "4" into the /proc/PID/clear_refs file of the
9	     task in question.
10	
11	  2. Wait some time.
12	
13	  3. Read soft-dirty bits from the PTEs.
14	
15	     This is done by reading from the /proc/PID/pagemap. The bit 55 of the
16	     64-bit qword is the soft-dirty one. If set, the respective PTE was
17	     written to since step 1.
18	
19	
20	  Internally, to do this tracking, the writable bit is cleared from PTEs
21	when the soft-dirty bit is cleared. So, after this, when the task tries to
22	modify a page at some virtual address the #PF occurs and the kernel sets
23	the soft-dirty bit on the respective PTE.
24	
25	  Note, that although all the task's address space is marked as r/o after the
26	soft-dirty bits clear, the #PF-s that occur after that are processed fast.
27	This is so, since the pages are still mapped to physical memory, and thus all
28	the kernel does is finds this fact out and puts both writable and soft-dirty
29	bits on the PTE.
30	
31	  While in most cases tracking memory changes by #PF-s is more than enough
32	there is still a scenario when we can lose soft dirty bits -- a task
33	unmaps a previously mapped memory region and then maps a new one at exactly
34	the same place. When unmap is called, the kernel internally clears PTE values
35	including soft dirty bits. To notify user space application about such
36	memory region renewal the kernel always marks new memory regions (and
37	expanded regions) as soft dirty.
38	
39	  This feature is actively used by the checkpoint-restore project. You
40	can find more details about it on http://criu.org
41	
42	
43	-- Pavel Emelyanov, Apr 9, 2013
Hide Line Numbers


About Kernel Documentation Linux Kernel Contact Linux Resources Linux Blog