On 06.10.21 10:27, Michal Hocko wrote:

On Tue 05-10-21 23:57:36, John Hubbard wrote:
[...]

quoted

1) Yes, just leave the strings in the kernel, that's simple and
it works, and the alternatives don't really help your case nearly
enough.

I do not have a strong opinion. Strings are easier to use but they
are more involved and the necessity of kref approach just underlines
that. There are going to be new allocations and that always can lead
to surprising side effects.  These are small (80B at maximum) so the
overall footpring shouldn't all that large by default but it can grow
quite large with a very high max_map_count. There are workloads which
really require the default to be set high (e.g. heavy mremap users). So
if anything all those should be __GFP_ACCOUNT and memcg accounted.

I do agree that numbers are just much more simpler from accounting,
performance and implementation POV.

+1

I can understand that having a string can be quite beneficial e.g., when 
dumping mmaps. If only user space knows the id <-> string mapping, that 
can be quite tricky.

However, I also do wonder if there would be a way to standardize/reserve 
ids, such that a given id always corresponds to a specific user. If we 
use an uint64_t for an id, there would be plenty room to reserve ids ...

I'd really prefer if we can avoid using strings and instead using ids.

-- 
Thanks,

David / dhildenb