Detailed Usages

DAMON provides below three interfaces for different users.

  • DAMON user space tool. This is for privileged people such as system administrators who want a just-working human-friendly interface. Using this, users can use the DAMON’s major features in a human-friendly way. It may not be highly tuned for special cases, though. It supports both virtual and physical address spaces monitoring. For more detail, please refer to its usage document.

  • debugfs interface. This is for privileged user space programmers who want more optimized use of DAMON. Using this, users can use DAMON’s major features by reading from and writing to special debugfs files. Therefore, you can write and use your personalized DAMON debugfs wrapper programs that reads/writes the debugfs files instead of you. The DAMON user space tool is one example of such programs. It supports both virtual and physical address spaces monitoring. Note that this interface provides only simple statistics for the monitoring results. For detailed monitoring results, DAMON provides a tracepoint.

  • Kernel Space Programming Interface. This is for kernel space programmers. Using this, users can utilize every feature of DAMON most flexibly and efficiently by writing kernel space DAMON application programs for you. You can even extend DAMON for various address spaces. For detail, please refer to the interface document.

debugfs Interface

DAMON exports eight files, attrs, target_ids, init_regions, schemes, monitor_on, kdamond_pid, mk_contexts and rm_contexts under its debugfs directory, <debugfs>/damon/.

Attributes

Users can get and set the sampling interval, aggregation interval, regions update interval, and min/max number of monitoring target regions by reading from and writing to the attrs file. To know about the monitoring attributes in detail, please refer to the Design. For example, below commands set those values to 5 ms, 100 ms, 1,000 ms, 10 and 1000, and then check it again:

# cd <debugfs>/damon
# echo 5000 100000 1000000 10 1000 > attrs
# cat attrs
5000 100000 1000000 10 1000

Target IDs

Some types of address spaces supports multiple monitoring target. For example, the virtual memory address spaces monitoring can have multiple processes as the monitoring targets. Users can set the targets by writing relevant id values of the targets to, and get the ids of the current targets by reading from the target_ids file. In case of the virtual address spaces monitoring, the values should be pids of the monitoring target processes. For example, below commands set processes having pids 42 and 4242 as the monitoring targets and check it again:

# cd <debugfs>/damon
# echo 42 4242 > target_ids
# cat target_ids
42 4242

Users can also monitor the physical memory address space of the system by writing a special keyword, “paddr\n” to the file. Because physical address space monitoring doesn’t support multiple targets, reading the file will show a fake value, 42, as below:

# cd <debugfs>/damon
# echo paddr > target_ids
# cat target_ids
42

Note that setting the target ids doesn’t start the monitoring.

Initial Monitoring Target Regions

In case of the virtual address space monitoring, DAMON automatically sets and updates the monitoring target regions so that entire memory mappings of target processes can be covered. However, users can want to limit the monitoring region to specific address ranges, such as the heap, the stack, or specific file-mapped area. Or, some users can know the initial access pattern of their workloads and therefore want to set optimal initial regions for the ‘adaptive regions adjustment’.

In contrast, DAMON do not automatically sets and updates the monitoring target regions in case of physical memory monitoring. Therefore, users should set the monitoring target regions by themselves.

In such cases, users can explicitly set the initial monitoring target regions as they want, by writing proper values to the init_regions file. Each line of the input should represent one region in below form.:

<target id> <start address> <end address>

The target id should already in target_ids file, and the regions should be passed in address order. For example, below commands will set a couple of address ranges, 1-100 and 100-200 as the initial monitoring target region of process 42, and another couple of address ranges, 20-40 and 50-100 as that of process 4242.:

# cd <debugfs>/damon
# echo "42   1       100
        42   100     200
        4242 20      40
        4242 50      100" > init_regions

Note that this sets the initial monitoring target regions only. In case of virtual memory monitoring, DAMON will automatically updates the boundary of the regions after one regions update interval. Therefore, users should set the regions update interval large enough in this case, if they don’t want the update.

Schemes

For usual DAMON-based data access aware memory management optimizations, users would simply want the system to apply a memory management action to a memory region of a specific access pattern. DAMON receives such formalized operation schemes from the user and applies those to the target processes.

Users can get and set the schemes by reading from and writing to schemes debugfs file. Reading the file also shows the statistics of each scheme. To the file, each of the schemes should be represented in each line in below form:

<target access pattern> <action> <quota> <watermarks>

You can disable schemes by simply writing an empty string to the file.

Target Access Pattern

The <target access pattern> is constructed with three ranges in below form:

min-size max-size min-acc max-acc min-age max-age

Specifically, bytes for the size of regions (min-size and max-size), number of monitored accesses per aggregate interval for access frequency (min-acc and max-acc), number of aggregate intervals for the age of regions (min-age and max-age) are specified. Note that the ranges are closed interval.

Action

The <action> is a predefined integer for memory management actions, which DAMON will apply to the regions having the target access pattern. The supported numbers and their meanings are as below.

  • 0: Call madvise() for the region with MADV_WILLNEED

  • 1: Call madvise() for the region with MADV_COLD

  • 2: Call madvise() for the region with MADV_PAGEOUT

  • 3: Call madvise() for the region with MADV_HUGEPAGE

  • 4: Call madvise() for the region with MADV_NOHUGEPAGE

  • 5: Do nothing but count the statistics

Quota

Optimal target access pattern for each action is workload dependent, so not easy to find. Worse yet, setting a scheme of some action too aggressive can cause severe overhead. To avoid such overhead, users can limit time and size quota for the scheme via the <quota> in below form:

<ms> <sz> <reset interval> <priority weights>

This makes DAMON to try to use only up to <ms> milliseconds for applying the action to memory regions of the target access pattern within the <reset interval> milliseconds, and to apply the action to only up to <sz> bytes of memory regions within the <reset interval>. Setting both <ms> and <sz> zero disables the quota limits.

When the quota limit is expected to be exceeded, DAMON prioritizes found memory regions of the target access pattern based on their size, access frequency, and age. For personalized prioritization, users can set the weights for the three properties in <priority weights> in below form:

<size weight> <access frequency weight> <age weight>

Watermarks

Some schemes would need to run based on current value of the system’s specific metrics like free memory ratio. For such cases, users can specify watermarks for the condition.:

<metric> <check interval> <high mark> <middle mark> <low mark>

<metric> is a predefined integer for the metric to be checked. The supported numbers and their meanings are as below.

  • 0: Ignore the watermarks

  • 1: System’s free memory rate (per thousand)

The value of the metric is checked every <check interval> microseconds.

If the value is higher than <high mark> or lower than <low mark>, the scheme is deactivated. If the value is lower than <mid mark>, the scheme is activated.

Statistics

It also counts the total number and bytes of regions that each scheme is tried to be applied, the two numbers for the regions that each scheme is successfully applied, and the total number of the quota limit exceeds. This statistics can be used for online analysis or tuning of the schemes.

The statistics can be shown by reading the schemes file. Reading the file will show each scheme you entered in each line, and the five numbers for the statistics will be added at the end of each line.

Example

Below commands applies a scheme saying “If a memory region of size in [4KiB, 8KiB] is showing accesses per aggregate interval in [0, 5] for aggregate interval in [10, 20], page out the region. For the paging out, use only up to 10ms per second, and also don’t page out more than 1GiB per second. Under the limitation, page out memory regions having longer age first. Also, check the free memory rate of the system every 5 seconds, start the monitoring and paging out when the free memory rate becomes lower than 50%, but stop it if the free memory rate becomes larger than 60%, or lower than 30%”.:

# cd <debugfs>/damon
# scheme="4096 8192  0 5    10 20    2"  # target access pattern and action
# scheme+=" 10 $((1024*1024*1024)) 1000" # quotas
# scheme+=" 0 0 100"                     # prioritization weights
# scheme+=" 1 5000000 600 500 300"       # watermarks
# echo "$scheme" > schemes

Turning On/Off

Setting the files as described above doesn’t incur effect unless you explicitly start the monitoring. You can start, stop, and check the current status of the monitoring by writing to and reading from the monitor_on file. Writing on to the file starts the monitoring of the targets with the attributes. Writing off to the file stops those. DAMON also stops if every target process is terminated. Below example commands turn on, off, and check the status of DAMON:

# cd <debugfs>/damon
# echo on > monitor_on
# echo off > monitor_on
# cat monitor_on
off

Please note that you cannot write to the above-mentioned debugfs files while the monitoring is turned on. If you write to the files while DAMON is running, an error code such as -EBUSY will be returned.

Monitoring Thread PID

DAMON does requested monitoring with a kernel thread called kdamond. You can get the pid of the thread by reading the kdamond_pid file. When the monitoring is turned off, reading the file returns none.

# cd <debugfs>/damon
# cat monitor_on
off
# cat kdamond_pid
none
# echo on > monitor_on
# cat kdamond_pid
18594

Using Multiple Monitoring Threads

One kdamond thread is created for each monitoring context. You can create and remove monitoring contexts for multiple kdamond required use case using the mk_contexts and rm_contexts files.

Writing the name of the new context to the mk_contexts file creates a directory of the name on the DAMON debugfs directory. The directory will have DAMON debugfs files for the context.

# cd <debugfs>/damon
# ls foo
# ls: cannot access 'foo': No such file or directory
# echo foo > mk_contexts
# ls foo
# attrs  init_regions  kdamond_pid  schemes  target_ids

If the context is not needed anymore, you can remove it and the corresponding directory by putting the name of the context to the rm_contexts file.

# echo foo > rm_contexts
# ls foo
# ls: cannot access 'foo': No such file or directory

Note that mk_contexts, rm_contexts, and monitor_on files are in the root directory only.

Tracepoint for Monitoring Results

DAMON provides the monitoring results via a tracepoint, damon:damon_aggregated. While the monitoring is turned on, you could record the tracepoint events and show results using tracepoint supporting tools like perf. For example:

# echo on > monitor_on
# perf record -e damon:damon_aggregated &
# sleep 5
# kill 9 $(pidof perf)
# echo off > monitor_on
# perf script