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+.. _idle_page_tracking:
+
+==================
+Idle Page Tracking
+==================
+
+Motivation
+==========
+
+The idle page tracking feature allows to track which memory pages are being
+accessed by a workload and which are idle. This information can be useful for
+estimating the workload's working set size, which, in turn, can be taken into
+account when configuring the workload parameters, setting memory cgroup limits,
+or deciding where to place the workload within a compute cluster.
+
+It is enabled by CONFIG_IDLE_PAGE_TRACKING=y.
+
+.. _user_api:
+
+User API
+========
+
+The idle page tracking API is located at ``/sys/kernel/mm/page_idle``.
+Currently, it consists of the only read-write file,
+``/sys/kernel/mm/page_idle/bitmap``.
+
+The file implements a bitmap where each bit corresponds to a memory page. The
+bitmap is represented by an array of 8-byte integers, and the page at PFN #i is
+mapped to bit #i%64 of array element #i/64, byte order is native. When a bit is
+set, the corresponding page is idle.
+
+A page is considered idle if it has not been accessed since it was marked idle
+(for more details on what "accessed" actually means see the :ref:`Implementation
+Details <impl_details>` section).
+To mark a page idle one has to set the bit corresponding to
+the page by writing to the file. A value written to the file is OR-ed with the
+current bitmap value.
+
+Only accesses to user memory pages are tracked. These are pages mapped to a
+process address space, page cache and buffer pages, swap cache pages. For other
+page types (e.g. SLAB pages) an attempt to mark a page idle is silently ignored,
+and hence such pages are never reported idle.
+
+For huge pages the idle flag is set only on the head page, so one has to read
+``/proc/kpageflags`` in order to correctly count idle huge pages.
+
+Reading from or writing to ``/sys/kernel/mm/page_idle/bitmap`` will return
+-EINVAL if you are not starting the read/write on an 8-byte boundary, or
+if the size of the read/write is not a multiple of 8 bytes. Writing to
+this file beyond max PFN will return -ENXIO.
+
+That said, in order to estimate the amount of pages that are not used by a
+workload one should:
+
+ 1. Mark all the workload's pages as idle by setting corresponding bits in
+    ``/sys/kernel/mm/page_idle/bitmap``. The pages can be found by reading
+    ``/proc/pid/pagemap`` if the workload is represented by a process, or by
+    filtering out alien pages using ``/proc/kpagecgroup`` in case the workload
+    is placed in a memory cgroup.
+
+ 2. Wait until the workload accesses its working set.
+
+ 3. Read ``/sys/kernel/mm/page_idle/bitmap`` and count the number of bits set.
+    If one wants to ignore certain types of pages, e.g. mlocked pages since they
+    are not reclaimable, he or she can filter them out using
+    ``/proc/kpageflags``.
+
+See Documentation/vm/pagemap.rst for more information about
+``/proc/pid/pagemap``, ``/proc/kpageflags``, and ``/proc/kpagecgroup``.
+
+.. _impl_details:
+
+Implementation Details
+======================
+
+The kernel internally keeps track of accesses to user memory pages in order to
+reclaim unreferenced pages first on memory shortage conditions. A page is
+considered referenced if it has been recently accessed via a process address
+space, in which case one or more PTEs it is mapped to will have the Accessed bit
+set, or marked accessed explicitly by the kernel (see mark_page_accessed()). The
+latter happens when:
+
+ - a userspace process reads or writes a page using a system call (e.g. read(2)
+   or write(2))
+
+ - a page that is used for storing filesystem buffers is read or written,
+   because a process needs filesystem metadata stored in it (e.g. lists a
+   directory tree)
+
+ - a page is accessed by a device driver using get_user_pages()
+
+When a dirty page is written to swap or disk as a result of memory reclaim or
+exceeding the dirty memory limit, it is not marked referenced.
+
+The idle memory tracking feature adds a new page flag, the Idle flag. This flag
+is set manually, by writing to ``/sys/kernel/mm/page_idle/bitmap`` (see the
+:ref:`User API <user_api>`
+section), and cleared automatically whenever a page is referenced as defined
+above.
+
+When a page is marked idle, the Accessed bit must be cleared in all PTEs it is
+mapped to, otherwise we will not be able to detect accesses to the page coming
+from a process address space. To avoid interference with the reclaimer, which,
+as noted above, uses the Accessed bit to promote actively referenced pages, one
+more page flag is introduced, the Young flag. When the PTE Accessed bit is
+cleared as a result of setting or updating a page's Idle flag, the Young flag
+is set on the page. The reclaimer treats the Young flag as an extra PTE
+Accessed bit and therefore will consider such a page as referenced.
+
+Since the idle memory tracking feature is based on the memory reclaimer logic,
+it only works with pages that are on an LRU list, other pages are silently
+ignored. That means it will ignore a user memory page if it is isolated, but
+since there are usually not many of them, it should not affect the overall
+result noticeably. In order not to stall scanning of the idle page bitmap,
+locked pages may be skipped too.