Re: [PATCH v4] dma-buf: Add DmaBufTotal counter in meminfo

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Tue Apr 20 2021 - 03:47:48 EST


On Tue 20-04-21 10:20:43, Mike Rapoport wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 09:04:51AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Mon 19-04-21 18:37:13, Christian König wrote:
> > > Am 19.04.21 um 18:11 schrieb Michal Hocko:
> > [...]
> > > > The question is not whether it is NUMA aware but whether it is useful to
> > > > know per-numa data for the purpose the counter is supposed to serve.
> > >
> > > No, not at all. The pages of a single DMA-buf could even be from different
> > > NUMA nodes if the exporting driver decides that this is somehow useful.
> >
> > As the use of the counter hasn't been explained yet I can only
> > speculate. One thing that I can imagine to be useful is to fill gaps in
> > our accounting. It is quite often that the memroy accounted in
> > /proc/meminfo (or oom report) doesn't add up to the overall memory
> > usage. In some workloads the workload can be huge! In many cases there
> > are other means to find out additional memory by a subsystem specific
> > interfaces (e.g. networking buffers). I do assume that dma-buf is just
> > one of those and the counter can fill the said gap at least partially
> > for some workloads. That is definitely useful.
>
> A bit off-topic.
>
> Michal, I think it would have been nice to have an explanation like above
> in Documentation/proc/meminfo, what do you say?

Not sure which specific parts (likely the unaccounted memory?) but sure
why not. Our /proc/meminfo is rather underdocumented. More information
cannot hurt.
--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs