GitLab

NOTE: ZVC are *not* the lightweight event counters.  ZVCs are reliable whereas
event counters do not need to be.

Zone based VM statistics are necessary to be able to determine what the state
of memory in one zone is.  In a NUMA system this can be helpful for local
reclaim and other memory optimizations that may be able to shift VM load in
order to get more balanced memory use.

It is also useful to know how the computing load affects the memory
allocations on various zones.  This patchset allows the retrieval of that data
from userspace.

The patchset introduces a framework for counters that is a cross between the
existing page_stats --which are simply global counters split per cpu-- and the
approach of deferred incremental updates implemented for nr_pagecache.

Small per cpu 8 bit counters are added to struct zone.  If the counter exceeds
certain thresholds then the counters are accumulated in an array of
atomic_long in the zone and in a...