Memory providers multiplexing (Was: [PATCH net-next v4 4/5] page_pool: remove PP_FLAG_PAGE_FRAG flag)

[Mina Almasry]

On Mon, Jul 10, 2023 at 10:44 AM Jason Gunthorpe <jgg at ziepe.ca> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jul 05, 2023 at 06:17:39PM -0700, Mina Almasry wrote:
>
> > Another issue is that in networks with low MTU, we could be DMAing
> > 1400/1500 bytes into each allocation, which is problematic if the
> > allocation is 8K+. I would need to investigate a bit to see if/how to
> > solve that, and we may end up having to split the page and again run
> > into the 'not enough room in struct page' problem.
>
> You don't have an intree driver to use this with, so who knows, but
> the out of tree GPU drivers tend to use a 64k memory management page
> size, and I don't expect you'd make progress with a design where a 64K
> naturaly sized allocator is producing 4k/8k non-compound pages just
> for netdev. We are still struggling with pagemap support for variable
> page size folios, so there is a bunch of technical blockers before
> drivers could do this.
>
> This is why it is so important to come with a complete in-tree
> solution, as we cannot review this design if your work is done with
> hacked up out of tree drivers.
>

I think you're assuming the proposal requires dma-buf exporter driver
changes, and I have a 'hacked up out of tree driver' not visible to
you. Both are not quite right. The proposal requires no changes to the
dma-buf exporter, and works with udmabuf _as is_, proving that. Please
do review the proposal:
https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20230710223304.1174642-1-almasrymina@google.com/

If you still don't like the approach, we can try something else.

> Fully and properly adding P2P ZONE_DEVICE to a real world driver is a
> pretty big ask still.
>

There is no such ask.

> > > Or allocate per page memory and do a memdesc like thing..
> >
> > I need to review memdesc more closely. Do you imagine I add a pointer
> > in struct page that points to the memdesc?
>
> Pointer to extra memory from the PFN has been the usual meaning of
> memdesc, so doing an interm where the pointer is in the struct page is
> a reasonable starting point.
>
> > > Though overall, you won't find devices creating struct pages for their
> > > P2P memory today, so I'm not sure what the purpose is. Jonathan
> > > already got highly slammed for proposing code to the kernel that was
> > > unusable. Please don't repeat that. Other than a special NVMe use case
> > > the interface for P2P is DMABUF right now and it is not struct page
> > > backed.
> > >
> >
> > Our approach is actually to extend DMABUF to provide struct page
> > backed attachment mappings, which as far as I understand sidesteps the
> > issues Jonathan ran into.
>
> No DMABUF exporters do this today, so your patch series is just as
> incomplete as the prior ones. Please don't post it as non-RFC,
> unusable code like this must not be merged.
>
> > that supports dmabuf and in fact a lot of my tests use udmabuf to
> > minimize the dependencies. The RFC may come with a udmabuf selftest to
> > showcase that any dmabuf, even a mocked one, would be supported.
>
> That is not good enough to get merged. You need to get agreement and
> coded merged from actual driver owners of dmabuf exporters that they
> want to support this direction. As above it has surprising road
> blocks outside netdev :\
>

The current proposal requires no changes to the dma-buf exporters:
https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20230710223304.1174642-1-almasrymina@google.com/

On dma-buf changes required. I do need approval from the dma-buf
maintainers, but AFAICT, no approval from the dma-buf exporters (all I
need is already supported). If we need to change direction to a
proposal that needs additional support from the driver owners, yes,
we'd need their approval, but this is not the case at the moment.

-- 
Thanks,
Mina