Re: [PATCH 14/19] mm: Introduce a cgroup for pinned memory

[Alistair Popple]

Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Thu, Feb 23, 2023 at 09:59:35AM +1100, Alistair Popple wrote:
>> The idea was every driver already needs to allocate a pages array to
>> pass to pin_user_pages(), and by necessity drivers have to keep a
>> reference to the contents of that in one form or another. So
>> conceptually the equivalent of:
>> 
>> struct vm_account {
>>        struct list_head possible_pinners;
>>        struct mem_cgroup *memcg;
>>        struct pages **pages;
>>        [...]
>> };
>> 
>> Unpinnig involves finding a new owner by traversing the list of
>> page->memcg_data->possible_pinners and iterating over *pages[] to figure
>> out if that vm_account actually has this page pinned or not and could
>> own it.
>> 
>> Agree this is costly though. And I don't think all drivers keep the
>> array around so "iterating over *pages[]" may need to be a callback.
>
> Is pinning in this context referring to FOLL_LONGTERM pins or any
> FOLL_PIN?  In the latter case block based direct I/O does not keep
> the pages array around, and also is absolutely not willing to pay
> for the overhead.

Good point. I was primarily targeting FOLL_LONGTERM users. I'm not too
familiar with block based direct I/O but from what I can tell it
currently doesn't respect any kind of RLIMIT anyway so I guess the
requirment to limit pinned pages there isn't so revelant.