Re: [RFC] Make use of non-dynamic dmabuf in RDMA

[Christian König]

Am 25.08.21 um 14:38 schrieb Jason Gunthorpe:
> On Wed, Aug 25, 2021 at 02:27:08PM +0200, Christian König wrote:
> > Am 25.08.21 um 14:18 schrieb Jason Gunthorpe:
> > > On Wed, Aug 25, 2021 at 08:17:51AM +0200, Christian König wrote:
> > >
> > > > The only real option where you could do P2P with buffer pinning are those
> > > > compute boards where we know that everything is always accessible to
> > > > everybody and we will never need to migrate anything. But even then you want
> > > > some mechanism like cgroups to take care of limiting this. Otherwise any
> > > > runaway process can bring down your whole system.
> > > Why? It is not the pin that is the problem, it was allocating GPU
> > > dedicated memory in the first place. pinning it just changes the
> > > sequence to free it. No different than CPU memory.
> > Pinning makes the memory un-evictable.
> >
> > In other words as long as we don't pin anything we can support as many
> > processes as we want until we run out of swap space. Swapping sucks badly
> > because your applications become pretty much unuseable, but you can easily
> > recover from it by killing some process.
> >
> > With pinning on the other hand somebody sooner or later receives an -ENOMEM
> > or -ENOSPC and there is no guarantee that this goes to the right process.
> It is not really different - you have the same failure mode once the
> system runs out of swap.
>
> This is really the kernel side trying to push a policy to the user
> side that the user side doesn't want..

But which is still the right thing to do as far as I can see. See 
userspace also doesn't want proper process isolation since it takes 
extra time.

Kernel development is driven by exposing the hardware functionality in a 
save and manageable manner to userspace, and not by fulfilling userspace 
requirements.

This is very important cause you otherwise you create a specialized 
system and not a general purpose kernel.

> Dedicated systems are a significant use case here and should be
> supported, even if the same solution wouldn't be applicable to someone
> running a desktop.

And exactly that approach is not acceptable.

Christian.

> Jason