Shrinker Debugfs Interface

Shrinker debugfs interface provides a visibility into the kernel memory shrinkers subsystem and allows to get information about individual shrinkers and interact with them.

For each shrinker registered in the system a directory in <debugfs>/shrinker/ is created. The directory’s name is composed from the shrinker’s name and an unique id: e.g. kfree_rcu-0 or sb-xfs:vda1-36.

Each shrinker directory contains count and scan files, which allow to trigger count_objects() and scan_objects() callbacks for each memcg and numa node (if applicable).

Usage:

  1. List registered shrinkers

$ cd /sys/kernel/debug/shrinker/
$ ls
dquota-cache-16     sb-devpts-28     sb-proc-47       sb-tmpfs-42
mm-shadow-18        sb-devtmpfs-5    sb-proc-48       sb-tmpfs-43
mm-zspool:zram0-34  sb-hugetlbfs-17  sb-pstore-31     sb-tmpfs-44
rcu-kfree-0         sb-hugetlbfs-33  sb-rootfs-2      sb-tmpfs-49
sb-aio-20           sb-iomem-12      sb-securityfs-6  sb-tracefs-13
sb-anon_inodefs-15  sb-mqueue-21     sb-selinuxfs-22  sb-xfs:vda1-36
sb-bdev-3           sb-nsfs-4        sb-sockfs-8      sb-zsmalloc-19
sb-bpf-32           sb-pipefs-14     sb-sysfs-26      thp-deferred_split-10
sb-btrfs:vda2-24    sb-proc-25       sb-tmpfs-1       thp-zero-9
sb-cgroup2-30       sb-proc-39       sb-tmpfs-27      xfs-buf:vda1-37
sb-configfs-23      sb-proc-41       sb-tmpfs-29      xfs-inodegc:vda1-38
sb-dax-11           sb-proc-45       sb-tmpfs-35
sb-debugfs-7        sb-proc-46       sb-tmpfs-40

  1. Get information about a specific shrinker

$ cd sb-btrfs\:vda2-24/
$ ls
count            scan

  1. Count objects

Each line in the output has the following format:

<cgroup inode id> <nr of objects on node 0> <nr of objects on node 1> ...
<cgroup inode id> <nr of objects on node 0> <nr of objects on node 1> ...
...

If there are no objects on all numa nodes, a line is omitted. If there are no objects at all, the output might be empty.

If the shrinker is not memcg-aware or CONFIG_MEMCG is off, 0 is printed as cgroup inode id. If the shrinker is not numa-aware, 0’s are printed for all nodes except the first one.

$ cat count
1 224 2
21 98 0
55 818 10
2367 2 0
2401 30 0
225 13 0
599 35 0
939 124 0
1041 3 0
1075 1 0
1109 1 0
1279 60 0
1313 7 0
1347 39 0
1381 3 0
1449 14 0
1483 63 0
1517 53 0
1551 6 0
1585 1 0
1619 6 0
1653 40 0
1687 11 0
1721 8 0
1755 4 0
1789 52 0
1823 888 0
1857 1 0
1925 2 0
1959 32 0
2027 22 0
2061 9 0
2469 799 0
2537 861 0
2639 1 0
2707 70 0
2775 4 0
2877 84 0
293 1 0
735 8 0

  1. Scan objects

The expected input format:

<cgroup inode id> <numa id> <number of objects to scan>

For a non-memcg-aware shrinker or on a system with no memory cgrups 0 should be passed as cgroup id.

$ cd /sys/kernel/debug/shrinker/
$ cd sb-btrfs\:vda2-24/

$ cat count | head -n 5
1 212 0
21 97 0
55 802 5
2367 2 0
225 13 0

$ echo "55 0 200" > scan

$ cat count | head -n 5
1 212 0
21 96 0
55 752 5
2367 2 0
225 13 0