[PATCH 1/4] memcg: Track exported dma-buffers

[T.J. Mercier]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2023 at 12:58 AM Michal Hocko <mhocko at suse.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon 09-01-23 21:38:04, T.J. Mercier wrote:
> > When a buffer is exported to userspace, use memcg to attribute the
> > buffer to the allocating cgroup until all buffer references are
> > released.
> >
> > Unlike the dmabuf sysfs stats implementation, this memcg accounting
> > avoids contention over the kernfs_rwsem incurred when creating or
> > removing nodes.
>
> I am not familiar with dmabuf infrastructure so please bear with me.
> AFAIU this patch adds a dmabuf specific counter to find out the amount
> of dmabuf memory used. But I do not see any actual charging implemented
> for that memory.
>
> I have looked at two random users of dma_buf_export cma_heap_allocate
> and it allocates pages to back the dmabuf (AFAIU) by cma_alloc
> which doesn't account to memcg, system_heap_allocate uses
> alloc_largest_available which relies on order_flags which doesn't seem
> to ever use __GFP_ACCOUNT.
>
> This would mean that the counter doesn't represent any actual memory
> reflected in the overall memory consumption of a memcg. I believe this
> is rather unexpected and confusing behavior. While some counters
> overlap and their sum would exceed the charged memory we do not have any
> that doesn't correspond to any memory (at least not for non-root memcgs).
>
> --
> Michal Hocko
> SUSE Labs

Thank you, that behavior is not intentional. I'm not looking at the
overall memcg charge yet otherwise I would have noticed this. I think
I understand what's needed for the charging part, but Shakeel
mentioned some additional work for "reclaim, OOM and charge context
and failure cases" on the cover letter which I need to look into.