Re: [PATCH 3/4] dma-debug: Dynamically expand the dma_debug_entry pool

From: Robin Murphy
Date: Tue Dec 04 2018 - 12:19:43 EST


On 04/12/2018 16:30, John Garry wrote:
On 04/12/2018 13:11, Robin Murphy wrote:
Hi John,

On 03/12/2018 18:23, John Garry wrote:
On 03/12/2018 17:28, Robin Murphy wrote:
Certain drivers such as large multi-queue network adapters can use pools
of mapped DMA buffers larger than the default dma_debug_entry pool of
65536 entries, with the result that merely probing such a device can
cause DMA debug to disable itself during boot unless explicitly given an
appropriate "dma_debug_entries=..." option.

Developers trying to debug some other driver on such a system may not be
immediately aware of this, and at worst it can hide bugs if they fail to
realise that dma-debug has already disabled itself unexpectedly by the
time the code of interest gets to run. Even once they do realise, it can
be a bit of a pain to emprirically determine a suitable number of
preallocated entries to configure without massively over-allocating.

There's really no need for such a static limit, though, since we can
quite easily expand the pool at runtime in those rare cases that the
preallocated entries are insufficient, which is arguably the least
surprising and most useful behaviour.

Hi Robin,

Do you have an idea on shrinking the pool again when the culprit
driver is removed, i.e. we have so many unused debug entries now
available?

I honestly don't believe it's worth the complication. This is a
development feature with significant overheads already, so there's not
an awful lot to gain by trying to optimise memory usage. If a system can
ever load a driver that makes hundreds of thousands of simultaneous
mappings, it can almost certainly spare 20-odd megabytes of RAM for the
corresponding debug entries in perpetuity. Sure, it does mean you'd need
to reboot to recover memory from a major leak, but that's mostly true of
the current behaviour too, and rebooting during driver development is
hardly an unacceptable inconvenience.


ok, I just thought that it would not be too difficult to implement this on the dma entry free path.

True, in the current code it wouldn't be all that hard, but it feels more worthwhile to optimise for allocation rather than freeing, and as soon as we start allocating memory for multiple entries at once, trying to free anything becomes extremely challenging.

In fact, having got this far in, what I'd quite like to do is to get rid
of dma_debug_resize_entries() such that we never need to free things at
all, since then we could allocate whole pages as blocks of entries to
save on masses of individual slab allocations.


On a related topic, is it possible for the user to learn the total entries created at a given point in time? If not, could we add a file in the debugfs folder for this?

I did get as far as pondering that you effectively lose track of utilisation once the low-water-mark of min_free_entries hits 0 and stays there - AFAICS it should be sufficient to just expose nr_total_entries as-is, since users can then calculate current and maximum occupancy based on *_free_entries. Does that sound reasonable to you?

That also indirectly reminds me that this lot is documented in DMA_API.txt, so I should be good and update that too...

Cheers,
Robin.