Re: [PATCH 0/6] rust: page: Support borrowing `struct page` and physaddr conversion

[Simona Vetter]

On Tue, Feb 04, 2025 at 03:38:17PM +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> > > It can still race with memory offlining, and it refuses ZONE_DEVICE
> > > pages. For the latter, we have a different way to check validity. See
> > > memory_failure() that first calls pfn_to_online_page() to then check
> > > get_dev_pagemap().
> > 
> > I'll give it a shot with these functions. If they work for my use case,
> > then it's good to have extra checks and I'll add them for v2. Thanks!
> 
> Let me know if you run into any issues.
> 
> > 
> > > 
> > > > 
> > > > If the answer is "no" then that's fine. It's still an unsafe function
> > > > and we need to document in the safety section that it should only be
> > > > used for memory that is either known to be allocated and pinned and will
> > > > not be freed while the `struct page` is borrowed, or memory that is
> > > > reserved and not owned by the buddy allocator, so in practice correct
> > > > use would not be racy with memory hot-remove anyway.
> > > > 
> > > > This is already the case for the drm/asahi use case, where the pfns
> > > > looked up will only ever be one of:
> > > > 
> > > > - GEM objects that are mapped to the GPU and whose physical pages are
> > > > therefore pinned (and the VM is locked while this happens so the objects
> > > > cannot become unpinned out from under the running code),
> > > 
> > > How exactly are these pages pinned/obtained?
> > 
> > Under the hood it's shmem. For pinning, it winds up at
> > `drm_gem_get_pages()`, which I think does a `shmem_read_folio_gfp()` on
> > a mapping set as unevictable.
> 
> Thanks. So we grab another folio reference via
> shmem_read_folio_gfp()->shmem_get_folio_gfp().
> 
> Hm, I wonder if we might end up holding folios residing in
> ZONE_MOVABLE/MIGRATE_CMA longer than we should.
> 
> Compared to memfd_pin_folios(), which simulates FOLL_LONGTERM and makes sure
> to migrate pages out of ZONE_MOVABLE/MIGRATE_CMA.
> 
> But that's a different discussion, just pointing it out, maybe I'm missing
> something :)

Good GPU Drivers (tm) are supposed to have a shrinker so we can at least
nuke some of them again. Some folks even looked into hooking up a migrate
callback through the address_space (or wherever that hook was, this is
from memory) so we can make this somewhat reliable. So yeah we're hogging
ZONE_MOVEABLE unduly still.

The other side is that there's about 2-3 good drivers (msm, i915, xe
should have a shrinker now too but I didn't check). The others all fall
various levels of short, or still have 3 times cargo-culted versions of
i915's pin-as-a-lock design and get it completely wrong.

So yeah I'm aware this isn't great, and we're at least glacially slowly
moving towards a common shrinker infrastructure that maybe in a glorious
future gets all this right. I mean it took us 15+ years to get to a
cgroups controller after all too, and that was also a well known issue of
just being able to hog memory with no controls and potentially cause
havoc.

Cheers, Sima
-- 
Simona Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
http://blog.ffwll.ch