rchar – I/O counter: chars read
The number of bytes which this task has caused
to be read from storage. This is simply the sum of bytes which this
process passed to read() and pread(). It includes things like tty IO
and it is unaffected by whether or not actual physical disk IO was
required (the read might have been satisfied from pagecache)
wchar – I/O counter: chars written
The number of bytes which this task has
caused, or shall cause to be written to disk. Similar caveats apply
here as with rchar.
syscr – I/O counter: read syscalls
Attempt to count the number of read I/O
operations, i.e. syscalls like read() and pread().
syscw – I/O counter: write syscalls
Attempt to count the number of write I/O
operations, i.e. syscalls like write() and pwrite().
read_bytes – I/O counter: bytes read
Attempt to count the number of bytes which
this process really did cause to be fetched from the storage layer.
Done at the submit_bio() level, so it is accurate for block-backed
filesystems.
write_bytes – I/O counter: bytes written
Attempt to count the number of bytes which
this process caused to be sent to the storage layer. This is done at
page-dirtying time.
cancelled_write_bytes
The big inaccuracy here is truncate. If a process writes 1MB to a file and then deletes the file, it will in fact perform no writeout. But it will have been accounted as having caused 1MB of write. In other words: The number of bytes which this process caused to not happen, by truncating pagecache. A task can cause “negative” IO too.