On Wed, 17 May 2017, Michal Hocko wrote:

quoted

We certainly can do that. The failure of the page faults are due to the
admin trying to move an application that is not aware of this and is using
mempols. That could be an error. Trying to move an application that
contains both absolute and relative node numbers is definitely something
that is potentiall so screwed up that the kernel should not muck around
with such an app.

Also user space can determine if the application is using memory policies
and can then take appropriate measures (message to the sysadmin to eval
tge situation f.e.) or mess aroud with the processes memory policies on
its own.

So this is certainly a way out of this mess.

So how are you going to distinguish VM_FAULT_OOM from an empty mempolicy
case in a raceless way?

You dont have to do that if you do not create an empty mempolicy in the
first place. The current kernel code avoids that by first allowing access
to the new set of nodes and removing the old ones from the set when done.