Re: [PATCH 0/4] Track exported dma-buffers with memcg

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>]

On Thu 12-01-23 07:56:31, Shakeel Butt wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 11, 2023 at 11:56:45PM +0100, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> > 
> [...]
> > I think eventually, at least for other "account gpu stuff in cgroups" use
> > case we do want to actually charge the memory.
> > 
> > The problem is a bit that with gpu allocations reclaim is essentially "we
> > pass the error to userspace and they get to sort the mess out". There are
> > some exceptions (some gpu drivers to have shrinkers) would we need to make
> > sure these shrinkers are tied into the cgroup stuff before we could enable
> > charging for them?
> > 
> 
> No, there is no requirement to have shrinkers or making such memory
> reclaimable before charging it. Though existing shrinkers and the
> possible future shrinkers would need to be converted into memcg aware
> shrinkers.
> 
> Though there will be a need to update user expectations that if they 
> use memcgs with hard limits, they may start seeing memcg OOMs after the
> charging of dmabuf.

Agreed. This wouldn't be the first in kernel memory charged memory that
is not directly reclaimable. With a dedicated counter an excessive
dmabuf usage would be visible in the oom report because we do print
memcg stats.

It is definitely preferable to have a shrinker mechanism but if that is
to be done in a follow up step then this is acceptable. But leaving out
charging from early on sounds like a bad choice to me.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs