A Google engineer has proposed a new Linux kernel feature called Page Alloc Hogger, submitted as an RFC patch series. It allows developers to allocate memory pages from specific nodes, zones, migration types, and orders via DebugFS. The tool is strictly for testing and debugging purposes, enabling reproduction of low-memory conditions, triggering kernel mechanisms like direct reclaim, kswapd, and the OOM killer, simplifying memory pressure debugging without custom kernel drivers, and measuring application performance under severe memory stress.
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