On Wed, Oct 6, 2021 at 2:27 AM David Hildenbrand [off-list ref] wrote:

On 06.10.21 10:27, Michal Hocko wrote:

quoted

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.

I wish it was that simple and for some names like [anon:.bss] or
[anon:dalvik-zygote space] reserving a unique id would work, however
some names like [anon:dalvik-/system/framework/boot-core-icu4j.art]
are generated dynamically at runtime and include package name.
Packages are constantly evolving, new ones are developed, names can
change, etc. So assigning a unique id for these names is not really
feasible.
That leaves us with the central facility option, which as I described
in my previous email would be prohibitive from performance POV (IPC
every time we have a new name or want to convert id to name).

I'm all for simplicity but the simple approach of using ids instead of
names unfortunately would not work for our usecases.

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb