Bug 2044630

Summary: housekeeping plugin GPU memory notifications not configurable
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Reporter: Paul Bransford <draeath>
Component: gnome-settings-daemonAssignee: Felipe Borges <feborges>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Desktop QE <desktop-qa-list>
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 8.5CC: feborges, fmuellner, tpelka, tpopela
Target Milestone: rc   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: If docs needed, set a value
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: Type: Bug
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Attachments:
Description Flags
screenshot snip of problematic notification none

Description Paul Bransford 2022-01-24 20:49:13 UTC 
Created attachment 1853192 [details]
screenshot snip of problematic notification

Created attachment 1853192 [details]
screenshot snip of problematic notification

Description of problem:
Patch 0001-housekeeping-Add-a-GPU-memory-usage-notification.patch adds GPU memory utilization support to the housekeeping plugin built into gnome-settings-daemon.

However, unlike other housekeeping functionality, there are no gconf/dconf/gsettings keys to control this. On systems with relatively low amounts of GPU memory, this results in frequent useless warning messages that cannot be disabled or hidden.

In my case, the only indication of low GPU memory is the notification itself.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
3.32.0-16.el8 (though it is likely this affects all versions of this, as I have not been able to locate any followups on this patch since it's initial authorship)


How reproducible:
100%


Steps to Reproduce:
1. Utilize Gnome with an nvidia GPU with relatively little memory, using the proprietary driver (
2. Run several applications such as Slack, MS Teams, Discord
3. Observe repeated warning notifications (screenshot snippet attached) - sometimes several per minute.

Actual results:
Warning functionality is mandatory


Expected results:
Warning functionality is configurable/optional


Additional info:
Host has the following GPU and driver:
GPU (lspci): 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107GL [Quadro K600] (rev a1)
Driver: kmod-nvidia-470.82.01-4.18.0-348.12.2-470.82.01-3.el8_5.x86_64 via https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/rhel8/x86_64
Kernel: 4.18.0-348.12.2.el8_5.x86_64

Note that this is not kernel/driver version specific. This has been occuring for months over several versions of both.
Comment 1 Paul Bransford 2022-01-24 20:51:50 UTC 
Copy/paste error in the additional info. I meant to say:
    Kernel: 4.18.0-348.12.2.el8_5.x86_64

Instead I duplicated the repo URL. Sorry!
Comment 2 Paul Bransford 2022-01-24 20:56:55 UTC 
Additional: apparently in newer (or older?) versions of the daemon, there is/was an 'active' key under 'org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.<plugin>' that can be used to disable a plugin. This functionality appears absent now (or at least in the version packaged for RHEL8). This means this workaround doesn't apply, which is the only workaround for this issue I was able to locate broadly (was on an ubuntu forum).

    $ gsettings list-recursively org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.housekeeping
    org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.housekeeping min-notify-period 10
    org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.housekeeping free-size-gb-no-notify 1
    org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.housekeeping ignore-paths @as []
    org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.housekeeping free-percent-notify 0.050000000000000003
    org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.housekeeping free-percent-notify-again 0.01
    $ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.housekeeping active false
    No such key “active”
Comment 3 Benjamin Berg 2022-01-25 10:33:26 UTC 
You can disable the plugin by modifying the corresponding file in `/etc/xdg/autostart/` and adding `Hidden=true` to it. This also works per-user if you drop the file in to `.config/autostart/`.

This was originally added due to issue https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1300852 as a workaround for gnome-shell leaking (GPU) memory. The idea was that this at least allowed user's to restart their session in order to free the memory again.

I believe that huge improvements were made on the memory leak issues on the GNOME Shell side since. As such, we might be able to just drop the patch from RHEL 8 again.
Comment 4 Florian Müllner 2022-01-26 18:42:09 UTC 
(In reply to Benjamin Berg from comment #3)

> I believe that huge improvements were made on the memory leak issues on the
> GNOME Shell side since.

The main issue was a gc problem in gjs, but I'm not sure how much it affected GPU memory instead of the normal heap.