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Michal Hocko authored
This patch (of 5): This is based on the idea from Mel Gorman discussed during LSFMM 2015 and independently brought up by Oleg Nesterov. The OOM killer currently allows to kill only a single task in a good hope that the task will terminate in a reasonable time and frees up its memory. Such a task (oom victim) will get an access to memory reserves via mark_oom_victim to allow a forward progress should there be a need for additional memory during exit path. It has been shown (e.g. by Tetsuo Handa) that it is not that hard to construct workloads which break the core assumption mentioned above and the OOM victim might take unbounded amount of time to exit because it might be blocked in the uninterruptible state waiting for an event (e.g. lock) which is blocked by another task looping in the page allocator. This patch reduces the probability of such a lockup by introducing a specialized kernel thread (oom_reaper) which tries to reclaim additional memory by preemptively reaping the anonymous or swapped out memory owned by the oom victim under an assumption that such a memory won't be needed when its owner is killed and kicked from the userspace anyway. There is one notable exception to this, though, if the OOM victim was in the process of coredumping the result would be incomplete. This is considered a reasonable constrain because the overall system health is more important than debugability of a particular application. A kernel thread has been chosen because we need a reliable way of invocation so workqueue context is not appropriate because all the workers might be busy (e.g. allocating memory). Kswapd which sounds like another good fit is not appropriate as well because it might get blocked on locks during reclaim as well. oom_reaper has to take mmap_sem on the target task for reading so the solution is not 100% because the semaphore might be held or blocked for write but the probability is reduced considerably wrt. basically any lock blocking forward progress as described above. In order to prevent from blocking on the lock without any forward progress we are using only a trylock and retry 10 times with a short sleep in between. Users of mmap_sem which need it for write should be carefully reviewed to use _killable waiting as much as possible and reduce allocations requests done with the lock held to absolute minimum to reduce the risk even further. The API between oom killer and oom reaper is quite trivial. wake_oom_reaper updates mm_to_reap with cmpxchg to guarantee only NULL->mm transition and oom_reaper clear this atomically once it is done with the work. This means that only a single mm_struct can be reaped at the time. As the operation is potentially disruptive we are trying to limit it to the ncessary minimum and the reaper blocks any updates while it operates on an mm. mm_struct is pinned by mm_count to allow parallel exit_mmap and a race is detected by atomic_inc_not_zero(mm_users). Signed-off-by:
Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com> Suggested-by:
aac45363