Thread (21 messages) 21 messages, 3 authors, 2017-05-19

Re: [RFC 1/6] mm, page_alloc: fix more premature OOM due to race with cpuset update

From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Date: 2017-05-19 07:37:56
Also in: cgroups, linux-mm, lkml

On Thu 18-05-17 14:07:45, Cristopher Lameter wrote:
On Thu, 18 May 2017, Michal Hocko wrote:
quoted
quoted
See above. OOM Kill in a cpuset does not kill an innocent task but a task
that does an allocation in that specific context meaning a task in that
cpuset that also has a memory policty.
No, the oom killer will chose the largest task in the specific NUMA
domain. If you just fail such an allocation then a page fault would get
VM_FAULT_OOM and pagefault_out_of_memory would kill a task regardless of
the cpusets.
Ok someone screwed up that code. There still is the determination that we
have a constrained alloc:
It would be much more easier if you read emails more carefully. In order
to have a constrained OOM you have to have either a non-null nodemask or
zonelist which. And as I've said above you do not have them from the
pagefault_out_of_memory context. The whole point of this discussion is
_that_ failing allocations will not work currently!
oom_kill:
	/*
         * Check if there were limitations on the allocation (only relevant for
         * NUMA and memcg) that may require different handling.
         */
        constraint = constrained_alloc(oc);
        if (constraint != CONSTRAINT_MEMORY_POLICY)
                oc->nodemask = NULL;
        check_panic_on_oom(oc, constraint);

-- Ok. A constrained failing alloc used to terminate the allocating
	process here. But it falls through to selecting a "bad process"
This behavior is there for ~10 years.
[...]
Can we restore the old behavior? If I just specify the right memory policy
I can cause other processes to just be terminated?
Not normally. Because out_of_memory called from the page allocator
context makes sure to kill tasks from the same NUMA domain (see
oom_unkillable_task).
 
quoted
quoted
Regardless of that the point earlier was that the moving logic can avoid
creating temporary situations of empty sets of nodes by analysing the
memory policies etc and only performing moves when doing so is safe.
How are you going to do that in a raceless way? Moreover the whole
discussion is about _failing_ allocations on an empty cpuset and
mempolicy intersection.
Again this is only working for processes that are well behaved and it
never worked in a different way before. There was always the assumption
that a process does not allocate in the areas that have allocation
constraints and that the process does not change memory policies nor
store them somewhere for late etc etc. HPC apps typically allocate memory
on startup and then go through long times of processing and I/O.
I would call it a bad design which then triggered a lot of work to make
it semi-working over years. This is what Vlastimil tries to address now.
And yes that might mean we would have to do some restrictions on the
semantics. But as you know this is a user visible API and changing
something that has been fundamentally underdefined initially is quite
hard to fix.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs

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