RAM usage on IMX8MM

[Krakert]

Hi everbody,

I'm currently working on an embedded Linux project targeting the i.MX8M Mini (i.MX8MM) platform with 1GB of RAM, using Wayland/Weston as the compositor and WPE WebKit + Cog as the browser stack. While performance overall is reasonable, I’ve been observing unexpectedly high memory usage, which seems problematic for a device with constrained RAM.

Here’s a snapshot of memory usage after launching Cog with a basic web app:

root@freshbrew:~# free
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        1005908      760528       72048       13868      173332      161520
Swap:             0           0           0

root@freshbrew:~# cat /proc/meminfo | grep -i cma
CmaTotal:         327680 kB
CmaFree:           10328 kB

That’s ~76% of total RAM used, leaving just ~70MB free. The CMA also appears heavily utilized (most of the 320MB is used), which might point to GPU or video-related usage, but that’s not clear yet.

System Setup:

I’ve added the following to my image install:

WEB_IMAGE_INSTALL += " \
    cog \
    wpewebkit \
"

And I'm using the FDO backend for WPE:

PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/wpebackend = "wpebackend-fdo"

Running on top of Wayland with Weston.

What I’m Trying to Understand:

• Is this high RAM usage expected behavior for WPE WebKit + Cog on embedded systems like the i.MX8MM?
• Is the CMA usage typical or excessive for running WPE with GPU acceleration?
• Are there known ways to optimize memory usage, reduce CMA allocation, or trim down WPE/WebKit resource consumption?
• Would using a different backend (e.g., wpebackend-rdk) or tweaking Cog/WPE runtime flags help?

Thanks!