Re: Regarding HMM

[Ralph Campbell <rcampbell@nvidia.com>]

On 8/18/20 12:15 AM, Valmiki wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Im trying to understand heterogeneous memory management, i have following doubts.
> 
> If HMM is being used we dont have to use DMA controller on device for memory transfers ?
> Without DMA if software is managing page faults and migrations, will there be any performance impacts ?
> 
> Is HMM targeted for any specific use cases where DMA controller is not there on device ?
> 
> Regards,
> Valmiki
> 

There are two APIs that are part of "HMM" and are independent of each other.

hmm_range_fault() is for getting the physical address of a system resident memory page that
a device can map but is not pinned in the usual way I/O increases the page reference count
to pin the page. The device driver has to handle invalidation callbacks to remove the device
mapping. This lets the device access the page without moving it.

migrate_vma_setup(), migrate_vma_pages(), and migrate_vma_finalize() are used by the device
driver to migrate data to device private memory. After migration, the system memory is freed
and the CPU page table holds an invalid PTE that points to the device private struct page
(similar to a swap PTE). If the CPU process faults on that address, there is a callback
to the driver to migrate it back to system memory. This is where device DMA engines can
be used to copy data to/from system memory and device private memory.

The use case for the above is to be able to run code such as OpenCL on GPUs and CPUs using
the same virtual addresses without having to call special memory allocators.
In other words, just use mmap() and malloc() and not clSVMAlloc().

There is a performance consideration here. If the GPU accesses the data over PCIe to
system memory, there is much less bandwidth than accessing local GPU memory. If the
data is to be accessed/used many times, it can be more efficient to migrate the data
to local GPU memory. If the data is only accessed a few times, then it is probably
more efficient to map system memory.