Posts

This is also posted to the mailing list. Hello community, This newsletter covers DAMON features that landed on the mainline, queued for the mainline, development statistics and misc events that were interesting to me that happened in v7.1-rc1..v7.2-rc1 time period (2026-04-26..2026-06-28). The newsletter covering the previous release cycle (v7.0-rc1..v7.1-rc1) is also available [1]. TLDR The last development cycle for DAMON was the busiest cycle of its mainline history (~5 years, since 2021 September)....

Authors: Kunwu Chan <kunwu.chan@gmail.com>, Wang Lian <lianux.mm@gmail.com> Overview DAMON monitors data access by sampling PTE (Page Table Entry) Accessed bits. It clears the Accessed bit but does not flush the TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer). This is an intentional design choice. Questions about this behavior come up repeatedly, both on the mailing list and in private inquiries. This document describes the reasoning, the trade-offs, and recommendations for users and testers. Background DAMON’s access check works as follows:...

This is also posted to the mailing list. Hello community, This news letter covers DAMON features that landed on the mainline, and misc events that were interesting to me that happened in v7.0-rc1..v7.1-rc1 time period (2026-02-22..2026-04.26). The news letter covering the previous release cycle (v6.19-rc1..v7.0-rc1) is also available [1]. Changes Landed On v7.0 All changes that were landed on v7.0-rc1 have successfully landed on v7.0. Read the news letter for v7....

This is also posted to the mailing list. Hello community, I shared DAMON quarterly news [1, 2, 3, 4] in 2024. I was further planning to write that for 2025 Q1. But I dropped the ball and never finished it. I’m starting a new series of DAMON news, that aims to cover each -rc1 release. This news letter covers DAMON features that landed on the mainline, and misc events that were interesting to me that happened in v6....

This is also posted to DAMON mailing list. It is a bit late, but let me share my retrospect of DAMON development for 2025, before my memory goes away. The yearly retrospects for 2022 [1], 2023 [2] and 2024 [3] are also available. Summary 2025 was the busiest year for DAMON development of its history. 33 people made 390 commits for DAMON in 2025. Those numbers are 65 % and 157 % increase from those of 2024....

This is also posted to DAMON mailing list. After DAMON has upstreamed in 2021, I shared yearly retrospects for 2022 [1] and 2023 [2]. And somehow I forgot to do that for 2024 and 2025. Let me share the retrospect of 2024, before my memory goes away. Summary 2024 was a year that DAMON has been more publicly and widely adopted. AWS published their usage of DAMON as a VLDB paper....

This is also posted to DAMON mailing list. Hello, Last year around this time, I shared a humble retrospect of DAMON for 2022[1], which was effectively the first year it had after it was merged in the mainline. As one more year has passed, I’d like to share that again for the second year of DAMON, with some events and statistics of this year’s DAMON development that I was personally interested in....