* Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
c'mon Andrew ...
Did you never want to see whether firefox is leaking [any sort of]
memory, and if yes, on what callsites? Try something like on an
already running firefox context:
perf stat -e kmem:mm_page_alloc \
-e kmem:mm_pagevec_free \
-e kmem:mm_page_free_direct \
-p $(pidof firefox-bin) sleep 10
... and "perf record" for the specific callsites.
this perf stuff is immensely flexible and a very unixish
abstraction. The perf.data contains timestamped trace entries of
page allocations and freeing done.
[...]
at least meminfo is an ABI for sure - vmstat too really.
But we can stop adding new fields into obsolete, inflexible and
clearly deficient interfaces, and we can standardize new
instrumentation to use modern instrumentation facilities - i.e.
tracepoints and perfcounters.
I'm not saying to put a tracepoint on every second line of the
kernel, but obviously Mel and Rik wanted this kind of info because
they found it useful in practice.
Ingo
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