Re: How to handle TIF_MEMDIE stalls?

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>]

On Wed 18-02-15 20:23:19, Tetsuo Handa wrote:
> [ cc fsdevel list - watch out for side effect of 9879de7373fc (mm: page_alloc:
> embed OOM killing naturally into allocation slowpath) which was merged between
> 3.19-rc6 and 3.19-rc7 , started from
> http://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=142348457310066&w=2 ]
> 
> Replying in this post picked up from several posts in this thread.
> 
> Michal Hocko wrote:
> > Besides that __GFP_WAIT callers should be prepared for the allocation
> > failure and should better cope with it. So no, I really hate something
> > like the above.
> 
> Those who do not want to retry with invoking the OOM killer are using
> __GFP_WAIT + __GFP_NORETRY allocations.
> 
> Those who want to retry with invoking the OOM killer are using
> __GFP_WAIT allocations.
> 
> Those who must retry forever with invoking the OOM killer, no matter how
> many processes the OOM killer kills, are using __GFP_WAIT + __GFP_NOFAIL
> allocations.
> 
> However, since use of __GFP_NOFAIL is prohibited,

IT IS NOT PROHIBITED. It is highly discouraged because GFP_NOFAIL is a
strong requirement and the caller should be really aware of the
consequences. Especially when the allocation is done under locked
context.

> I think many of
> __GFP_WAIT users are expecting that the allocation fails only when
> "the OOM killer set TIF_MEMDIE flag to the caller but the caller
> failed to allocate from memory reserves".

This is not what __GFP_WAIT is defined for. It says that the allocator
might sleep.

> Also, the implementation
> before 9879de7373fc (mm: page_alloc: embed OOM killing naturally
> into allocation slowpath) effectively supported __GFP_WAIT users
> with such expectation.

same as GFP_KERNEL == GFP_NOFAIL for small allocations currently which
causes a lot of troubles which were not anticipated at the time this
was introduced. And we _should_ move away from that model. Because
GFP_NOFAIL should be really explicit rather than implicit.

> Michal Hocko wrote:
> > Because they cannot perform any IO/FS transactions and that would lead
> > to a premature OOM conditions way too easily. OOM killer is a _last
> > resort_ reclaim opportunity not something that would happen just because
> > you happen to be not able to flush dirty pages. 
> 
> But you should not have applied such change without making necessary
> changes to GFP_NOFS / GFP_NOIO users with such expectation and testing
> at linux-next.git . Applying such change after 3.19-rc6 is a sucker punch.

This is a nonsense. OOM was disbaled for !__GFP_FS for ages (since
before git era).
 
> Michal Hocko wrote:
> > Well, you are beating your machine to death so you can hardly get any
> > time guarantee. It would be nice to have a better feedback mechanism to
> > know when to back off and fail the allocation attempt which might be
> > blocking OOM victim to pass away. This is extremely tricky because we
> > shouldn't be too eager to fail just because of a sudden memory pressure.
> 
> Michal Hocko wrote:
> > >   I wish only somebody like kswapd repeats the loop on behalf of all
> > >   threads waiting at memory allocation slowpath...
> > 
> > This is the case when the kswapd is _able_ to cope with the memory
> > pressure.
> 
> It looks wasteful for me that so many threads (greater than number of
> available CPUs) are sleeping at cond_resched() in shrink_slab() when
> checking SysRq-t. Imagine 1000 threads sleeping at cond_resched() in
> shrink_slab() on a machine with only 1 CPU. Each thread gets a chance
> to try calling reclaim function only when all other threads gave that
> thread a chance at cond_resched(). Such situation is almost mutually
> preventing from making progress. I wish the following mechanism.

Feel free to send patches which are not breaking other loads...
[...]

> Michal Hocko wrote:
> > Failing __GFP_WAIT allocation is perfectly fine IMO. Why do you think
> > this is a problem?
> 
> Killing a user space process or taking filesystem error actions (e.g.
> remount-ro or kernel panic), which choice is less painful for users?
> I believe that !(gfp_mask & __GFP_FS) check is a bug and should be removed.

pre-mature OOM killer just because the current allocator context doesn't
allow for real reclaim is even worse.

> Rather, shouldn't allocations without __GFP_FS get more chance to succeed
> than allocations with __GFP_FS? If I were the author, I might have added
> below check instead.
> 
>    /* This is not a critical allocation. Don't invoke the OOM killer. */
>    if (gfp_mask & __GFP_FS)
>            goto out;

This doesn't make any sense what so ever. So regular GFP_KERNEL|USER
allocations wouldn't invoke oom killer. This includes page faults and
basically most of allocations.

> Falling into retry loop with same watermark might prevent rescuer threads from
> doing memory allocation which is needed for making free memory. Maybe we should
> use lower watermark for GFP_NOIO and below, middle watermark for GFP_NOFS, high
> watermark for GFP_KERNEL and above.

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs

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