Re: [PATCH RFC 00/12] dma: Enable dmem cgroup tracking

Maxime Ripard
2025-03-10T12:15:57Z

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On Mon, Mar 10, 2025 at 01:06:06PM +0100, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> Here's preliminary work to enable dmem tracking for heavy users of DMA
> allocations on behalf of userspace: v4l2, DRM, and dma-buf heaps.
>
> It's not really meant for inclusion at the moment, because I really
> don't like it that much, and would like to discuss solutions on how to
> make it nicer.
>
> In particular, the dma dmem region accessors don't feel that great to
> me. It duplicates the logic to select the proper accessor in
> dma_alloc_attrs(), and it looks fragile and potentially buggy to me.
>
> One solution I tried is to do the accounting in dma_alloc_attrs()
> directly, depending on a flag being set, similar to what __GFP_ACCOUNT
> is doing.
>
> It didn't work because dmem initialises a state pointer when charging an
> allocation to a region, and expects that state pointer to be passed back
> when uncharging. Since dma_alloc_attrs() returns a void pointer to the
> allocated buffer, we need to put that state into a higher-level
> structure, such as drm_gem_object, or dma_buf.
>
> Since we can't share the region selection logic, we need to get the
> region through some other mean. Another thing I consider was to return
> the region as part of the allocated buffer (through struct page or
> folio), but those are lost across the calls and dma_alloc_attrs() will
> only get a void pointer. So that's not doable without some heavy
> rework, if it's a good idea at all.

One thing I forgot to mention is that it makes it harder than it could
for subsystems that can allocate from multiple allocators (like... all
the ones included in this series at least).

I only added proper tracking in the backends using dma_alloc_attrs(),
but they also support vmalloc. In what region vmalloc allocations should
be tracked (if any) is an open-question to me. Similarly, some use
dma_alloc_noncontiguous().

Also, I've set the size of the "default" DMA allocation region to
U64_MAX, but that's obviously wrong and will break any relative metric.
I'm not sure what would be the correct size though.

Maxime

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