[PATCH v1 0/5] Add memory shrinker to VirtIO-GPU DRM driver

[Dmitry Osipenko]

On 3/10/22 00:51, Rob Clark wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 9, 2022 at 12:06 PM Dmitry Osipenko
> <dmitry.osipenko at collabora.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 3/9/22 03:56, Rob Clark wrote:
>>>> If we really can't track madvise state in the guest for dealing with
>>>> host memory pressure, I think the better option is to introduce
>>>> MADV:WILLNEED_REPLACE, ie. something to tell the host kernel that the
>>>> buffer is needed but the previous contents are not (as long as the GPU
>>>> VA remains the same).  With this the host could allocate new pages if
>>>> needed, and the guest would not need to wait for a reply from host.
>>> If variant with the memory ballooning will work, then it will be
>>> possible to track the state within guest-only. Let's consider the
>>> simplest variant for now.
>>>
>>> I'll try to implement the balloon driver support in the v2 and will get
>>> back to you.
>>>
>>
>> I looked at the generic balloon driver and looks like this not what we
>> want because:
>>
>> 1. Memory ballooning is primarily about handling memory overcommit
>> situations. I.e. when there are multiple VMs consuming more memory than
>> available in the system. Ballooning allows host to ask guest to give
>> unused pages back to host and host could give pages to other VMs.
>>
>> 2. Memory ballooning operates with guest memory pages only. I.e. each
>> ballooned page is reported to/from host in a form of page's DMA address.
>>
>> 3. There is no direct connection between host's OOM events and the
>> balloon manager. I guess host could watch system's memory pressure and
>> inflate VMs' balloons on low memory, releasing the guest's memory to the
>> system, but apparently this use-case not supported by anyone today, at
>> least I don't see Qemu supporting it.
>>
> 
> hmm, on CrOS I do see balloon getting used to balance host vs guest
> memory.. but admittedly I've not yet looked closely at how that works,
> and it does seem like we have some things that are not yet upstream
> all over the place (not to mention crosvm vs qemu)

That's interesting, I missed that CrOS uses a customized ballooning.

>> So the virtio-balloon driver isn't very useful for us as-is.
>>
>> One possible solution could be to create something like a new
>> virtio-shrinker device or add shrinker functionality to the virtio-gpu
>> device, allowing host to ask guests to drop shared caches. Host then
>> should become a PSI handler. I think this should be doable in a case of
>> crosvm. In a case of GNU world, it could take a lot of effort to get
>> everything to upstreamable state, at first there is a need to
>> demonstrate real problem being solved by this solution.
> 
> I guess with 4GB chromebooks running one or more VMs in addition to
> lots of browser tabs in the host, it shouldn't be too hard to
> demonstrate a problem ;-)

But then guest also should have a significant amount of BOs in cache to
purge, which potentially could be solved using a timer approach.

> (but also, however we end up solving that, certainly shouldn't block
> this series)

Sure, there is no problem with extending shrinker functionality with
more features later on, so the host's shrinker isn't a blocker.

>> The other minor issue is that only integrated GPUs may use system's
>> memory and even then they could use a dedicated memory carveout, i.e.
>> releasing VRAM BOs may not help with host's OOM. In case of virgl
>> context we have no clue about where buffers are physically located. On
>> the other hand, in the worst case dropping host caches just won't help
>> with OOM.
> 
> Userspace should know whether the BO has CPU storage, so I don't think
> this should be a problem virtio_gpu needs to worry about
> 
>> It's now unclear how we should proceed with the host-side shrinker
>> support. Thoughts?
>>
>> We may start easy and instead of thinking about host-side shrinker, we
>> could make VirtIO-GPU driver to expire cached BOs after a certain
>> timeout. Mesa already uses timeout-based BO caching, but it doesn't have
>> an alarm timer and simply checks expiration when BO is allocated. Should
>> be too much trouble to handle timers within Mesa since it's executed in
>> application context, easier to do it in kernel, like VC4 driver does it
>> for example. This is not good as a proper memory shrinker, but could be
>> good enough in practice.
> 
> I think that, given virgl uses host storage, guest shrinker should be
> still useful.. so I think continue with this series.

Guest shrinker indeed will be useful for virgl today. I was already
questioning why virgl needs both host and guest storages, maybe it will
move to a host-only storage approach in the future.

I think the variant with the timer expiration actually could be
interesting to try because it should allow host to purge its VM BOs by
itself, preventing host OOMs.

> For host shrinker, I'll have to look more at when crosvm triggers
> balloon inflation.  I could still go the MADV:WILLNEED_REPLACE
> approach instead, which does have the advantage of host kernel not
> relying on host userspace or vm having a chance to run in order to
> release pages.  The downside (perhaps?) is it would be more specific
> to virtgpu-native-context and less so to virgl or venus (but I guess
> there doesn't currently exist a way for madvise to be useful for vk
> drivers).

I'll also take a look at what CrOS does, maybe it has some interesting
ideas.