linux-phytec-ti

mm: /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh to force vmstat update

Provide /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh to force an immediate update of
per-cpu into global vmstats: useful to avoid a sleep(2) or whatever
before checking counts when testing.  Originally added to work around a
bug which left counts stranded indefinitely on a cpu going idle (an
inaccuracy magnified when small below-batch numbers represent "huge"
amounts of memory), but I believe that bug is now fixed: nonetheless,
this is still a useful knob.

Its schedule_on_each_cpu() is probably too expensive just to fold into
reading /proc/meminfo itself: give this mode 0600 to prevent abuse.
Allow a write or a read to do the same: nothing to read, but "grep -h
Shmem /proc/sys/vm/stat_refresh /proc/meminfo" is convenient.  Oh, and
since global_page_state() itself is careful to disguise any underflow as
0, hack in an "Invalid argument" and pr_warn() if a counter is negative
after the refresh - this helped to fix a misaccounting of
NR_ISOLATED_FILE in my migration code.

But on recent kernels, I find that NR_ALLOC_BATCH and NR_PAGES_SCANNED
often go negative some of the time.  I have not yet worked out why, but
have no evidence that it's actually harmful.  Punt for the moment by
just ignoring the anomaly on those.

Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: "Kirill A. Shutemov" <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Andres Lagar-Cavilla <andreslc@google.com>
Cc: Yang Shi <yang.shi@linaro.org>
Cc: Ning Qu <quning@gmail.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Andres Lagar-Cavilla <andreslc@google.com>
Cc: Konstantin Khlebnikov <koct9i@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>