mm_slowpath_stressor

This project contains a set of program tools created with purpose to push on the Linux's allocation slowpath and measure overhead of those slowpath algorithms.

Tools:

• stressor.c

  This program forks processes that allocate anonymous or pagecache memory and then touch each page while doing some arithmetic work in-between. The aim is to measure how much overhead penalty (in terms of execution time) is added by the kernel's allocation slowpath.

• balloon.c

  This program is meant to simply set itself to specified oom_score_adj (ideally -1000) and allocate+fault amount of memory, which can be used to quickly shrink the available memory pool.

Compilation

Build with simple gcc with no extra arguments (tested on RHEL8.7 and RHEL9.1).