[Bug 214425] [drm][amdgpu][TTM] Page pool memory never gets freed

[bugzilla-daemon@kernel.org]

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=214425

--- Comment #3 from Rafael Ristovski (rafael.ristovski@gmail.com) ---
(In reply to Martin Doucha from comment #2)
> (In reply to Rafael Ristovski from comment #1)
> > According to amdgpu devs, this is a feature where the allocated pages are
> > kept around in case they are needed later on. TTM is able to release the
> > memory in case the memory pressure increases.
> 
> I understand the logic behind keeping idle buffers allocated for a while.
> But it does not make sense to keep them for hours after last use and the
> release mechanism on increased memory pressure does not seem to be working.
> 
> When I run a large compilation overnight, starting from a fresh reboot and
> shutting down all graphics software including the X server, I'll often come
> back in the morning to find that 70% of all RAM is allocated in idle TTM
> buffers and GCC is stuck swapping for hours. The TTM buffers were likely
> allocated by some GPU-accelerated build computation halfway through the
> night. But this is harder to reproduce than the games I've mentioned in the
> initial bugreport.

Indeed, I too run into situations where even if I purposefully trigger an OOM
situation just to get the TTM "cache" to evict itself through memory pressure,
_it still does not end up releasing all of the memory_.

There are also the following two sysfs files, simply reading them triggers an
eviction of GTT/VRAM:
> cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/amdgpu_evict_vram
> cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/amdgpu_evict_gtt

this can be confirmed as working with tools like `radeontop`/`nvtop`.

However, this once again does not release the TTM buffers.

As you can see in the issue I linked, I never got a reply about a mechanism to
manually release TTM memory. I will attempt coercing an answer on IRC, perhaps
I will have better luck asking directly there.

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