Hi MM and DRM people, during the discussions about per-file OOM badness [1] it repeatedly came up that it should be possible to simply track the DRM GEM memory usage by some new MM counters. The basic problem statement is as follows: in the DRM subsystem drivers can allocate buffer aka. GEM objects on behalf of a userspace process. In many cases those buffers behave just like anonymous memory, but they may be used only by the devices driven by the DRM drivers. As the buffers can be quite large (multi-MB is the norm, rather than the exception) userspace will not map/fault them into the process address space when it doesn't need access to the content of the buffers. Thus the memory used by those buffers is not accounted to any process and evades visibility by the usual userspace tools and the OOM handling. This series tries to remedy this situation by making such memory visible by accounting it exclusively to the process that created the GEM object. For now it only hooks up the tracking to the CMA helpers and the etnaviv drivers, which was enough for me to prove the concept and see it actually working, other drivers could follow if the proposal sounds sane. Known shortcomings of this very simplistic implementation: 1. GEM objects can be shared between processes by exporting/importing them as dma-bufs. When they are shared between multiple processes, killing the process that got the memory accounted will not actually free the memory, as the object is kept alive by the sharing process. 2. It currently only accounts the full size of them GEM object, more advanced devices/drivers may only sparsely populate the backing storage of the object as needed. This could be solved by having more granular accounting. I would like to invite everyone to poke holes into this proposal to see if this might get us on the right trajectory to finally track GEM memory usage or if it (again) falls short and doesn't satisfy the requirements we have for graphics memory tracking. Regards, Lucas [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20220531100007.174649-1-christian.koenig@xxxxxxx/ Lucas Stach (5): mm: add MM_DRIVERPAGES drm/gem: track mm struct of allocating process in gem object drm/gem: add functions to account GEM object memory usage drm/cma-helper: account memory used by CMA GEM objects drm/etnaviv: account memory used by GEM buffers drivers/gpu/drm/drm_gem.c | 42 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ drivers/gpu/drm/drm_gem_cma_helper.c | 4 +++ drivers/gpu/drm/etnaviv/etnaviv_gem.c | 3 ++ fs/proc/task_mmu.c | 6 ++-- include/drm/drm_gem.h | 15 ++++++++++ include/linux/mm.h | 3 +- include/linux/mm_types_task.h | 1 + kernel/fork.c | 1 + 8 files changed, 72 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) -- 2.30.2
