Re: [RFC PATCH 02/14] mm/hms: heterogenenous memory system (HMS) documentation

[Jerome Glisse <jglisse@redhat.com>]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2018 at 12:11:42PM -0700, Logan Gunthorpe wrote:
> 
> 
> On 2018-12-04 11:57 a.m., Jerome Glisse wrote:
> >> That sounds needlessly restrictive. Let the kernel arbitrate what
> >> memory an application gets, don't design a system where applications
> >> are hard coded to a memory type. Applications can hint, or optionally
> >> specify an override and the kernel can react accordingly.
> > 
> > You do not want to randomly use non cache coherent memory inside your
> > application :) This is not gonna go well with C++ or atomic :) Yes they
> > are legitimate use case where application can decide to give up cache
> > coherency temporarily for a range of virtual address. But the application
> > needs to understand what it is doing and opt in to do that knowing full
> > well that. The version thing allows for scenario like. You do not have
> > to define a new version with every new type of memory. If your new memory
> > has all the properties of v1 than you expose it as v1 and old application
> > on the new platform will use your new memory type being non the wiser.
> 
> I agree with Dan and the general idea that this version thing is really
> ugly. Define some standard attributes so the application can say "I want
> cache-coherent, high bandwidth memory". If there's some future
> new-memory attribute, then the application needs to know about it to
> request it.

So version is a bad prefix, what about type, prefixing target with a
type id. So that application that are looking for a certain type of
memory (which has a set of define properties) can select them. Having
a type file inside the directory and hopping application will read
that sysfs file is a recipies for failure from my point of view. While
having it in the directory name is making sure that the application
has some idea of what it is doing.

> 
> Also, in the same vein, I think it's wrong to have the API enumerate all
> the different memory available in the system. The API should simply
> allow userspace to say it wants memory that can be accessed by a set of
> initiators with a certain set of attributes and the bind call tries to
> fulfill that or fallback on system memory/hmm migration/whatever.

We have existing application that use topology today to partition their
workload and do load balancing. Those application leverage the fact that
they are only running on a small set of known platform with known topology
here i want to provide a common API so that topology can be queried in a
standard by application.

Yes basic application will not leverage all this information and will
be happy enough with give me memory that will be fast for initiator A
and B. That can easily be implemented inside userspace library which
dumbs down the topology on behalf of application.

I believe that proposing a new infrastructure should allow for maximum
expressiveness. The HMS API in this proposal allow to express any kind
of directed graph hence i do not see any limitation going forward. At
the same time userspace library can easily dumbs this down for average
Joe/Jane application.

Cheers,
Jérôme