linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] mm/swap: add function get_total_swap_pages to expose total_swap

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Date:   Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:18:23 +0100
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
To:     Christian König <christian.koenig@....com>
Cc:     "He, Roger" <Hongbo.He@....com>,
        "linux-mm@...ck.org" <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        "linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        "dri-devel@...ts.freedesktop.org" <dri-devel@...ts.freedesktop.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm/swap: add function get_total_swap_pages to expose
 total_swap_pages

On Tue 30-01-18 10:00:07, Christian König wrote:
> Am 30.01.2018 um 08:55 schrieb Michal Hocko:
> > On Tue 30-01-18 02:56:51, He, Roger wrote:
> > > Hi Michal:
> > > 
> > > We need a API to tell TTM module the system totally has how many swap
> > > cache.  Then TTM module can use it to restrict how many the swap cache
> > > it can use to prevent triggering OOM.  For Now we set the threshold of
> > > swap size TTM used as 1/2 * total size and leave the rest for others
> > > use.
> > Why do you so much memory? Are you going to use TB of memory on large
> > systems? What about memory hotplug when the memory is added/released?
> 
> For graphics and compute applications on GPUs it isn't unusual to use large
> amounts of system memory.
> 
> Our standard policy in TTM is to allow 50% of system memory to be pinned for
> use with GPUs (the hardware can't do page faults).
> 
> When that limit is exceeded (or the shrinker callbacks tell us to make room)
> we wait for any GPU work to finish and copy buffer content into a shmem
> file.
> 
> This copy into a shmem file can easily trigger the OOM killer if there isn't
> any swap space left and that is something we want to avoid.
> 
> So what we want to do is to apply this 50% rule to swap space as well and
> deny allocation of buffer objects when it is exceeded.

How does that help when the rest of the system might eat swap?

> > > But get_nr_swap_pages is the only API we can accessed from other
> > > module now.  It can't cover the case of the dynamic swap size
> > > increment.  I mean: user can use "swapon" to enable new swap file or
> > > swap disk dynamically or "swapoff" to disable swap space.
> > Exactly. Your scaling configuration based on get_nr_swap_pages or the
> > available memory simply sounds wrong.
> 
> Why? That is pretty much exactly what we are doing with buffer objects and
> system memory for years.

Could you be more specific? What kind of buffer objects you have in
mind?

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs