Re: [PATCH 0/4] Let userspace explicitly trigger memory reclaims

[Christian König]

On 5/6/26 17:43, Nicolas Frattaroli wrote:
> On Wednesday, 6 May 2026 17:06:56 Central European Summer Time Steven Price wrote:
>> On 06/05/2026 11:45, Nicolas Frattaroli wrote:
>>> RAM is not, in fact, cheap. Especially on embedded systems with a low
>>> amount of memory, but known and well-defined userspace, more explicit
>>> resource management can lead to better utilisation patterns. As an
>>> example, a resource manager process on a purpose-built device may wish
>>> to launch, and then explicitly swap out, memory of processes that are
>>> kept "warm", to improve perceived startup latency of individual
>>> full-screen applications without making the kernel figure out the usage
>>> pattern from observation alone in order to swap out the right pages.
>>
>> Have you considered memory control groups (memcg) for this purpose?
>> Imposing a lower limit than currently allocated should trigger reclaim,
>> so 'background' applications could have the limit lowered and then
>> restored when moved to the foreground.
> 
> This is a suggestion in line with what I've made to the entity for
> whom I am adding this, but was told that for them they really do want
> tight control without having to use cgroups into technically doing it
> by dynamically adjusting the limits of them.

I agree with Steven that cgroups looks like a better fit for this.

We had similar approaches for DMA-buf where Android people upstreamed their hand crafted resource reporting framework exposed through sysfs. That turned into a quite a mess and was recently reverted after Greg intervened and said that this is not really a good use case for sysfs.

This case here is of course different since it is only for a specific driver and not kernel wide framework etc... so I don't think that Dave, Simona, Greg or Linus will block it.

But the question is still if it wouldn't be better to solve it in a generalized manner and not each driver implementing its own sysfs interface.

> I do think that writing 0 to `memory.high` to swap it out and `"max"`
> to allow it to swap back in might work, though that'll then apply to
> all of the process' memory, not just the GPU resources.
> 
> I will ask for clarification internally.

I think you need to come up with some kind of justification which not only explains why you want this, but also why cgroups can't be used and maybe even why crgoups can't be extended to do this.

Regards,
Christian.