Difference between revisions of "Task-diag"

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(→‎Proposed solution: + few missing fields to TASK_DIAG_BASE)
 
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{| class="wikitable"
 
{| class="wikitable"
|| TASK_DIAG_BASE || PID, PGID, SID, TID, comm
+
|| TASK_DIAG_BASE || PID, PPID, PGID, SID, TID, state, comm
 
|-
 
|-
 
|| TASK_DIAG_CRED || UID, GID, groups, capabilities
 
|| TASK_DIAG_CRED || UID, GID, groups, capabilities
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==== ps (emulation) ====
 
==== ps (emulation) ====
  
Get pid, tid, pgid and comm for 50000 processes.
+
Get pid, tid, pgid and comm for 50000 processes. The code used is available [https://github.com/avagin/linux-task-diag/tree/task-diag-proc/tools/testing/selftests/task_diag from here].
  
 
Existing interface:
 
Existing interface:

Latest revision as of 22:03, 24 September 2018

This articles describes a new proposed interface to get information about running processes (roughly same info that is now available from /proc/PID/* files).

Limitations of /proc/PID interface[edit]

Current interface is a bunch of files in /proc/PID. While this appears to be simple and There are a number of problems with it.

Lots of syscalls[edit]

At least three syscalls per each PID are required — open(), read(), and close().

For example, a mere ps ax command performs these 3 syscalls for each of 3 files (stat, status, cmdline) for each process in the system. This results in thousands of syscalls and therefore thousands of user/kernel context switches.

Variety of formats[edit]

There are many different formats used by files in /proc/PID/ hierarchy. Therefore, there is a need to write parser for each such format.

Not enough information[edit]

Example: /proc/PID/fd/ doesn't contain file open flags or current position, so we had to introduce /proc/PID/fdinfo/.

Non-extendable formats[edit]

Some formats in /proc/PID are non-extendable. For example, /proc/PID/maps last column (file name) is optional, therefore there is no way to add more columns without breaking the format.

Slow read due to extra info[edit]

Sometimes getting information is slow due to extra attributes that are not always needed. For example, /proc/PID/smaps contains VmFlags field (which can't be added to /proc/PID/maps, see previous item), but it also contains page stats that take long time to generate.

$ time cat /proc/*/maps > /dev/null
real	0m0.061s
user	0m0.002s
sys	0m0.059s


$ time cat /proc/*/smaps > /dev/null
real	0m0.253s
user	0m0.004s
sys	0m0.247s

Proposed solution[edit]

Proposed is the /proc/task_diag file, which operates based on the following principles:

  • Transactional: write request, read response
  • Netlink message format (same as used by sock_diag; binary and extendable)
  • Ability to specify a set of processes to get info about
TASK_DIAG_DUMP_ALL dump all processes
TASK_DIAG_DUMP_ALL_THREAD dump all threads
TASK_DIAG_DUMP_CHILDREN dump children of a specified task
TASK_DIAG_DUMP_THREAD dump threads of a specified task
TASK_DIAG_DUMP_ONE Dump one task
  • Optimal grouping of attributes
    • Any attribute in a group can't affect a response time

The following groups are proposed:

TASK_DIAG_BASE PID, PPID, PGID, SID, TID, state, comm
TASK_DIAG_CRED UID, GID, groups, capabilities
TASK_DIAG_STAT per-task and per-process statistics (same as taskstats, not avail in /proc)
TASK_DIAG_VMA mapped memory regions and their access permissions (same as maps)
TASK_DIAG_VMA_STAT memory consumption for each mapping (same as smaps)

Performance measurements[edit]

ps (emulation)[edit]

Get pid, tid, pgid and comm for 50000 processes. The code used is available from here.

Existing interface:

$ time ./task_proc_all a
real    0m0.279s
user    0m0.013s
sys     0m0.255s

New interface:

$ time ./task_diag_all a
real    0m0.051s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.049s

Using perf tool[edit]

The following is a quote from David Ahern email:

> Using the fork test command:
>    10,000 processes; 10k proc with 5 threads = 50,000 tasks
>    reading /proc: 11.3 sec
>    task_diag:      2.2 sec
>
> @7,440 tasks, reading /proc is at 0.77 sec and task_diag at 0.096
>
> 128 instances of sepcjbb, 80,000+ tasks:
>     reading /proc: 32.1 sec
>     task_diag:      3.9 sec
>
> So overall much snappier startup times.

Alternative (bad) solutions[edit]

The following information is only interesting in a historical context.

task_diag netlink socket[edit]

This was the original proposal -- create something very similar to sock_diag (aka tcp_diag aka inet_diag).

It appeared to be a bad one because:

  • It's not obvious where to get pid and user namespaces
  • It's impossible to restrict netlink sockets:
    • Credentials are saved when a socket is created
    • Process can drop privileges, but netlink doesn't care
    • The same socket can be used to get process attributes and to set ip addresses

See also[edit]