| .. _soft_dirty: |
| |
| =============== |
| 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 |
| |
| 1. Clear soft-dirty bits from the task's PTEs. |
| |
| This is done by writing "4" into the ``/proc/PID/clear_refs`` file of the |
| task in question. |
| |
| 2. Wait some time. |
| |
| 3. Read soft-dirty bits from the PTEs. |
| |
| This is done by reading from the ``/proc/PID/pagemap``. The bit 55 of the |
| 64-bit qword is the soft-dirty one. If set, the respective PTE was |
| written to since step 1. |
| |
| |
| 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 |
| modify a page at some virtual address the #PF occurs and the kernel sets |
| the soft-dirty bit on the respective PTE. |
| |
| Note, that although all the task's address space is marked as r/o after the |
| soft-dirty bits clear, the #PF-s that occur after that are processed fast. |
| This is so, since the pages are still mapped to physical memory, and thus all |
| the kernel does is finds this fact out and puts both writable and soft-dirty |
| bits on the PTE. |
| |
| While in most cases tracking memory changes by #PF-s is more than enough |
| there is still a scenario when we can lose soft dirty bits -- a task |
| unmaps a previously mapped memory region and then maps a new one at exactly |
| the same place. When unmap is called, the kernel internally clears PTE values |
| including soft dirty bits. To notify user space application about such |
| memory region renewal the kernel always marks new memory regions (and |
| expanded regions) as soft dirty. |
| |
| This feature is actively used by the checkpoint-restore project. You |
| can find more details about it on http://criu.org |
| |
| |
| -- Pavel Emelyanov, Apr 9, 2013 |