Re: [RFC] bpf: account ring buffer backing pages separately from Lost RAM

["David Hildenbrand (Arm)" <david@kernel.org>]

On 8/15/26 11:18, Xiang Gao wrote:
> Hi,

Hi,

> 
> I would like to discuss accounting BPF ring buffer backing pages in
> system-wide memory reports.
> 
> BPF ring buffers allocate their data and metadata as order-0 pages directly
> from the buddy allocator, and then map those pages with vmap().

I assume there is a reason the slab isn't used, right? Are these pages mapped
into user space such that page->mapcount would get used?

Can you point me at relevant code?

> 
> Because vmap() maps caller-owned pages, these backing pages are not counted
> by VmallocUsed. They are also not slab pages. As a result, most BPF ring
> buffer memory is not represented by an existing named /proc/meminfo category
> and appears as Lost RAM in Android memory reports.
> 
> We measured this on an Android 6.18 kernel.
> 
> Test case:
> 
>   32 BPF ring buffer maps
>   16 MiB data area per map
>   512 MiB total data area
> 
> Observed changes:
> 
>   Lost RAM:       approximately +529 MiB
>   VmallocUsed:      approximately +2 MiB
>   Slab:        approximately unchanged
> 
> After destroying all maps, the values returned close to baseline.
> 
> The question is whether the kernel should expose the unique physical backing
> pages of live BPF ring buffers through a dedicated global counter and a
> /proc/meminfo entry, for example:
> 
>   BpfRingbuf: <value in kB>

This looks a bit too specific for my taste. And I think we should try to no
inflate these statistics here too much.

> 
> The proposed counter would include:
> 
>   * ring buffer data pages;
>   * metadata pages;
>   * consumer and producer position pages.
> 
> It would exclude:
> 
>   * the second virtual mapping of data pages;
>   * the pages[] pointer array;
>   * map metadata allocations;
>   * vmap page tables.
> 
> The goal is to account for the currently unclassified direct backing pages.
> Slab- and vmalloc-backed auxiliary allocations are already represented by
> existing memory categories and should not be counted again.
> 
> A possible implementation is an NR_BPF_RINGBUF vmstat counter maintained by
> the ring buffer allocation and free paths, with the aggregate exposed through
> /proc/meminfo.
> 
> Questions:
> 
> 1. Is a dedicated BPF ring buffer counter appropriate?

I don't think so.

See [1] where we just had the same discussion for tracing buffers. For them,
Steve [2] had an idea on how to expose them more fine-grained and tracing specific.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/r/20260810094025.136705-1-gaoxiang17@xiaomi.com
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/r/20260810105710.6ee5e493@gandalf.local.home

> 2. Should this be represented as an NR_* vmstat counter?

I don't think so.

> 3. Is /proc/meminfo an acceptable interface for this information?

Again, I don't think so. "Lost RAM" really is just "excessive memory allocated
by some other subsystem".

I agree that some users might want to figure out what is consuming that much
memory, but I don't think growing /proc/meminfo in that way is really what we want.

> 4. Is counting only unique physical backing pages the correct accounting unit?

I'd assume the "It would exclude" part above should not be accounted there, if
that's what you mean.

-- 
Cheers,

David