Re: [PATCH] dma-buf: system_heap: account for system heap allocation in memcg

[Maxime Ripard]

Hi TJ,

On Fri, Dec 12, 2025 at 08:25:19AM +0900, T.J. Mercier wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2025 at 4:31 AM Eric Chanudet <echanude@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > The system dma-buf heap lets userspace allocate buffers from the page
> > allocator. However, these allocations are not accounted for in memcg,
> > allowing processes to escape limits that may be configured.
> >
> > Pass the __GFP_ACCOUNT for our allocations to account them into memcg.
> 
> We had a discussion just last night in the MM track at LPC about how
> shared memory accounted in memcg is pretty broken. Without a way to
> identify (and possibly transfer) ownership of a shared buffer, this
> makes the accounting of shared memory, and zombie memcg problems
> worse. :\

Are there notes or a report from that discussion anywhere?

The way I see it, the dma-buf heaps *trivial* case is non-existent at
the moment and that's definitely broken. Any application can bypass its
cgroups limits trivially, and that's a pretty big hole in the system.

The shared ownership is indeed broken, but it's not more or less broken
than, say, memfd + udmabuf, and I'm sure plenty of others.

So we really improve the common case, but only make the "advanced"
slightly more broken than it already is.

Would you disagree?

Maxime

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