Re: [RFC PATCH 01/19] mm: Introduce vm_account

[David Hildenbrand]

On 24.01.23 06:42, Alistair Popple wrote:
> Kernel drivers that pin pages should account these pages against
> either user->locked_vm or mm->pinned_vm and fail the pinning if
> RLIMIT_MEMLOCK is exceeded and CAP_IPC_LOCK isn't held.
>
> Currently drivers open-code this accounting and use various methods to
> update the atomic variables and check against the limits leading to
> various bugs and inconsistencies. To fix this introduce a standard
> interface for charging pinned and locked memory. As this involves
> taking references on kernel objects such as mm_struct or user_struct
> we introduce a new vm_account struct to hold these references. Several
> helper functions are then introduced to grab references and check
> limits.
>
> As the way these limits are charged and enforced is visible to
> userspace we need to be careful not to break existing applications by
> charging to different counters. As a result the vm_account functions
> support accounting to different counters as required.
>
> A future change will extend this to also account against a cgroup for
> pinned pages.

The term "vm_account" is misleading, no? VM_ACCOUNT is for accounting 
towards the commit limit ....

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb