[PATCH 0/4] kdump: crashkernel reservation from CMA

[David Hildenbrand]

On 06.12.23 12:08, Philipp Rudo wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Dec 2023 17:59:02 +0100
> Michal Hocko <mhocko at suse.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri 01-12-23 16:51:13, Philipp Rudo wrote:
>>> On Fri, 1 Dec 2023 12:55:52 +0100
>>> Michal Hocko <mhocko at suse.com> wrote:
>>>    
>>>> On Fri 01-12-23 12:33:53, Philipp Rudo wrote:
>>>> [...]
>>>>> And yes, those are all what-if concerns but unfortunately that is all
>>>>> we have right now.
>>>>
>>>> Should theoretical concerns without an actual evidence (e.g. multiple
>>>> drivers known to be broken) become a roadblock for this otherwise useful
>>>> feature?
>>>
>>> Those concerns aren't just theoretical. They are experiences we have
>>> from a related feature that suffers exactly the same problem regularly
>>> which wouldn't exist if everybody would simply work "properly".
>>
>> What is the related feature?
> 
> kexec
> 
>>> And yes, even purely theoretical concerns can become a roadblock for a
>>> feature when the cost of those theoretical concerns exceed the benefit
>>> of the feature. The thing is that bugs will be reported against kexec.
>>> So _we_ need to figure out which of the shitty drivers caused the
>>> problem. That puts additional burden on _us_. What we are trying to
>>> evaluate at the moment is if the benefit outweighs the extra burden
>>> with the information we have at the moment.
>>
>> I do understand your concerns! But I am pretty sure you do realize that
>> it is really hard to argue theoreticals.  Let me restate what I consider
>> facts. Hopefully we can agree on these points
>> 	- the CMA region can be used by user space memory which is a
>> 	  great advantage because the memory is not wasted and our
>> 	  experience has shown that users do care about this a lot. We
>> 	  _know_ that pressure on making those reservations smaller
>> 	  results in a less reliable crashdump and more resources spent
>> 	  on tuning and testing (especially after major upgrades).  A
>> 	  larger reservation which is not completely wasted for the
>> 	  normal runtime is addressing that concern.
>> 	- There is no other known mechanism to achieve the reusability
>> 	  of the crash kernel memory to stop the wastage without much
>> 	  more intrusive code/api impact (e.g. a separate zone or
>> 	  dedicated interface to prevent any hazardous usage like RDMA).
>> 	- implementation wise the patch has a very small footprint. It
>> 	  is using an existing infrastructure (CMA) and it adds a
>> 	  minimal hooking into crashkernel configuration.
>> 	- The only identified risk so far is RDMA acting on this memory
>> 	  without using proper pinning interface. If it helps to have a
>> 	  statement from RDMA maintainers/developers then we can pull
>> 	  them in for a further discussion of course.
>> 	- The feature requires an explicit opt-in so this doesn't bring
>> 	  any new risk to existing crash kernel users until they decide
>> 	  to use it. AFAIU there is no way to tell that the crash kernel
>> 	  memory used to be CMA based in the primary kernel. If you
>> 	  believe that having that information available for
>> 	  debugability would help then I believe this shouldn't be hard
>> 	  to add.  I think it would even make sense to mark this feature
>> 	  experimental to make it clear to users that this needs some
>> 	  time before it can be marked production ready.
>>
>> I hope I haven't really missed anything important. The final
> 
> If I understand Documentation/core-api/pin_user_pages.rst correctly you
> missed case 1 Direct IO. In that case "short term" DMA is allowed for
> pages without FOLL_LONGTERM. Meaning that there is a way you can
> corrupt the CMA and with that the crash kernel after the production
> kernel has panicked.
> 
> With that I don't see a chance this series can be included unless
> someone can explain me that that the documentation is wrong or I
> understood it wrong.

I think you are right. We'd have to disallow any FOLL_PIN on these CMA 
pages, or find other ways of handling that (detect that there are no 
short-term pins any).

But, I'm also wondering how MMU-notifier-based approaches might 
interfere, where CMA pages might be transparently mapped into secondary 
MMUs, possibly having DMA going on.

Are we sure that all these secondary MMUs are inactive as soon as we kexec?

-- 
Cheers,

David / dhildenb