Re: [PATCH v4] dma-buf: Add DmaBufTotal counter in meminfo

[Christian König]

Am 20.04.21 um 09:04 schrieb Michal Hocko:
> On Mon 19-04-21 18:37:13, Christian König wrote:
> > Am 19.04.21 um 18:11 schrieb Michal Hocko:
> [...]
> > > The question is not whether it is NUMA aware but whether it is useful to
> > > know per-numa data for the purpose the counter is supposed to serve.
> > No, not at all. The pages of a single DMA-buf could even be from different
> > NUMA nodes if the exporting driver decides that this is somehow useful.
> As the use of the counter hasn't been explained yet I can only
> speculate. One thing that I can imagine to be useful is to fill gaps in
> our accounting. It is quite often that the memroy accounted in
> /proc/meminfo (or oom report) doesn't add up to the overall memory
> usage. In some workloads the workload can be huge! In many cases there
> are other means to find out additional memory by a subsystem specific
> interfaces (e.g. networking buffers). I do assume that dma-buf is just
> one of those and the counter can fill the said gap at least partially
> for some workloads. That is definitely useful.

Yes, completely agree. I'm just not 100% sure if the DMA-buf framework 
should account for that or the individual drivers exporting DMA-bufs.

See below for a further explanation.

> What I am trying to bring up with NUMA side is that the same problem can
> happen on per-node basis. Let's say that some user consumes unexpectedly
> large amount of dma-buf on a certain node. This can lead to observable
> performance impact on anybody on allocating from that node and even
> worse cause an OOM for node bound consumers. How do I find out that it
> was dma-buf that has caused the problem?

Yes, that is the direction my thinking goes as well, but also even further.

See DMA-buf is also used to share device local memory between processes 
as well. In other words VRAM on graphics hardware.

On my test system here I have 32GB of system memory and 16GB of VRAM. I 
can use DMA-buf to allocate that 16GB of VRAM quite easily which then 
shows up under /proc/meminfo as used memory.

But that isn't really system memory at all, it's just allocated device 
memory.

> See where I am heading?

Yeah, totally. Thanks for pointing this out.

Suggestions how to handle that?

Regards,
Christian.