Re: [Question] Are "device exclusive non-swap entries" / "SVM atomics in Nouveau" still getting used in practice?

David Hildenbrand
2025-01-24T17:54:11Z

>>> On integrated the gpu is tied into the coherency
>>> fabric, so there it's not needed.
>>>
>>> I think the more fundamental question with both this function here and
>>> with forced migration to device memory is that there's no guarantee it
>>> will work out.
>>
>> Yes, in particular with device-exclusive, it doesn't really work with THP
>> and is only limited to anonymous memory. I have patches to at least make it
>> work reliably with THP.
>
> I should have crawled through the implementation first before replying.
> Since it only looks at folio_mapcount() make_device_exclusive() should at
> least in theory work reliably on anon memory, and not be impacted by
> elevated refcounts due to migration/ksm/thp/whatever.

Yes, there is -- in theory -- nothing blocking the conversion except the
folio lock. That's different than page migration.

[...]

>
>> Then, we seem to give up too easily if we cannot lock the folio when wanting
>> to convert to device-exclusive, which also looks rather odd. But well, maybe
>> it just works good enough in the common case, or there is some other retry
>> logic that makes it fly.
>
> I've crawled through the path to migrate pages from device memory back to
> system memory a few months ago, and found some livelock issues in there.
> Wouldn't be surprised if m_d_e has some of the same, but I didn't dig
> through it (least because intel can't use it because not-so-great hw
> design).

Yes, that might be possible. Maybe something keeps spinning while the
folio is locked instead of properly waiting for the lock.

... or someone is trying to convert a tail page of a THP, in which case
we will also keep failing the conversion right now.

>> There are other concerns I have (what if the page is pinned and access
>> outside of the user space page tables?). Maybe there was not need to handle
>> these cases so far.
>
> I think that's also ok, but might be good to document this clearly that
> concurrent direct i/o or rdma registered buffer or whatever will mess with
> this. The promise is only between the gpu and the cpu, not anything else,
> in current apis. At least to my knowledge.

Well, the issue is that e.g., iouring fixed buffers can be accessed from
the CPU using the direct map from the CPU, not necessarily using DMA
from a device.

In any case, I'm planning on adding some code-level documentation for
that and look into extending the high-level doc while at it.

>
>> So best I can do is make anonymous memory more reliable with
>> device-exclusive and fixup some of the problematic parts that I see (e.g.,
>> broken page reclaim, page migration, ...).
>>
>> But before starting to cleanup+improve the existing handling of anonymous
>> memory, I was wondering if this whole thing is getting used at all.
>
> Yeah if this can be made reliable (under the limitation of only anon
> memory and only excluding userspace access) then I expect we'll need this
> for a very long time. I just had no idea whether even that is possible.
>
> What isn't good is if it's only mostly reliable, like the current
> pgmap->ops->migrate_to_ram() path in do_swap_page() still is.

I'll cc you on patches once I figure out some details on how to fix some
page table walkers that really don't expect these non-swap entries.

Fortunately, the hmm test device is in place to trigger some shaky
scenarios.

--
Cheers,

David / dhildenb