[PATCH v16 0/4] RDMA: Add dma-buf support

[Daniel Vetter]

On Thu, Feb 04, 2021 at 11:00:32AM -0800, John Hubbard wrote:
> On 2/4/21 10:44 AM, Alex Deucher wrote:
> ...
> > > > The argument is that vram is a scarce resource, but I don't know if
> > > > that is really the case these days.  At this point, we often have as
> > > > much vram as system ram if not more.
> > > 
> > > I thought the main argument was that GPU memory could move at any time
> > > between the GPU and CPU and the DMA buf would always track its current
> > > location?
> > 
> > I think the reason for that is that VRAM is scarce so we have to be
> > able to move it around.  We don't enforce the same limitations for
> > buffers in system memory.  We could just support pinning dma-bufs in
> > vram like we do with system ram.  Maybe with some conditions, e.g.,
> > p2p is possible, and the device has a large BAR so you aren't tying up
> > the BAR window.

Minimally we need cgroups for that vram, so it can be managed. Which is a
bit stuck unfortunately. But if we have cgroups with some pin limit, I
think we can easily lift this.

> Excellent. And yes, we are already building systems in which VRAM is
> definitely not scarce, but on the other hand, those newer systems can
> also handle GPU (and NIC) page faults, so not really an issue. For that,
> we just need to enhance HMM so that it does peer to peer.
> 
> We also have some older hardware with large BAR1 apertures, specifically
> for this sort of thing.
> 
> And again, for slightly older hardware, without pinning to VRAM there is
> no way to use this solution here for peer-to-peer. So I'm glad to see that
> so far you're not ruling out the pinning option.

Since HMM and ZONE_DEVICE came up, I'm kinda tempted to make ZONE_DEVICE
ZONE_MOVEABLE (at least if you don't have a pinned vram contigent in your
cgroups) or something like that, so we could benefit from the work to make
sure pin_user_pages and all these never end up in there?

https://lwn.net/Articles/843326/

Kind inspired by the recent lwn article.
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
http://blog.ffwll.ch