While looking at improving the saved_cmdlines cache I found a huge amount
of wasted memory that should be used for the cmdlines.
The tracing data saves pids during the trace. At sched switch, if a trace
occurred, it will save the comm of the task that did the trace. This is
saved in a "cache" that maps pids to comms and exposed to user space via
the /sys/kernel/tracing/saved_cmdlines file. Currently it only caches by
default 128 comms.
The structure that uses this creates an array to store the pids using
PID_MAX_DEFAULT (which is usually set to 32768). This causes the structure
to be of the size of 131104 bytes on 64 bit machines.
In hex: 131104 = 0x20020, and since the kernel allocates generic memory in
powers of two, the kernel would allocate 0x40000 or 262144 bytes to store
this structure. That leaves 131040 bytes of wasted space.
Worse, the structure points to an allocated array to store the comm names,
which is 16 bytes times the amount of names to save (currently 128), which
is 2048 bytes. Instead of allocating a separate array, make the structure
end with a variable length string and use the extra space for that.
This is similar to a recommendation that Linus had made about eventfs_inode names:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240130190355.11486-5-torvalds@linux-foundation.org/
Instead of allocating a separate string array to hold the saved comms,
have the structure end with: char saved_cmdlines[]; and round up to the
next power of two over sizeof(struct saved_cmdline_buffers) + num_cmdlines * TASK_COMM_LEN
It will use this extra space for the saved_cmdline portion.
Now, instead of saving only 128 comms by default, by using this wasted
space at the end of the structure it can save over 8000 comms and even
saves space by removing the need for allocating the other array.
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-trace-kernel/20240209063622.1f7b6d5f@rorschach.local.home
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Cc: Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@kernel.org>
Cc: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Cc: Vincent Donnefort <vdonnefort@google.com>
Cc: Sven Schnelle <svens@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Mete Durlu <meted@linux.ibm.com>
Fixes: 939c7a4f04 ("tracing: Introduce saved_cmdlines_size file")
Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt (Google) <rostedt@goodmis.org>
44dc5c41b5