Re: [patch 08/12] mm: page_alloc: wait for OOM killer progress before retrying

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>]

On Wed 25-03-15 02:17:12, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> There is not much point in rushing back to the freelists and burning
> CPU cycles in direct reclaim when somebody else is in the process of
> OOM killing, or right after issuing a kill ourselves, because it could
> take some time for the OOM victim to release memory.

Yes this makes sense and it is better than what we have now. The
question is how long we should wait. I can see you have gone with HZ.
What is the value based on? Have your testing shown that the OOM victim
manages to die within a second most of the time?

I do not want to get into which value is the best discussion but I would
expect a larger value. Most OOM victims are not blocked so they would
wake up soon. This is a safety net for those who are blocked and I do
not think we have to expedite those rare cases and rather optimize for
"regular" OOM situations. How about 10-30s?

> This is a very cold error path, so there is not much hurry.  Use the
> OOM victim waitqueue to wait for victims to actually exit, which is a
> solid signal that the memory pinned by those tasks has been released.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
> ---
>  mm/oom_kill.c   | 11 +++++++----
>  mm/page_alloc.c | 42 +++++++++++++++++++++++++-----------------
>  2 files changed, 32 insertions(+), 21 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/mm/oom_kill.c b/mm/oom_kill.c
> index 5cfda39b3268..e066ac7353a4 100644
> --- a/mm/oom_kill.c
> +++ b/mm/oom_kill.c
> @@ -711,12 +711,15 @@ bool out_of_memory(struct zonelist *zonelist, gfp_t gfp_mask,
>  		killed = 1;
>  	}
>  out:
> +	if (test_thread_flag(TIF_MEMDIE))
> +		return true;
>  	/*
> -	 * Give the killed threads a good chance of exiting before trying to
> -	 * allocate memory again.
> +	 * Wait for any outstanding OOM victims to die.  In rare cases
> +	 * victims can get stuck behind the allocating tasks, so the
> +	 * wait needs to be bounded.  It's crude alright, but cheaper
> +	 * than keeping a global dependency tree between all tasks.
>  	 */
> -	if (killed)
> -		schedule_timeout_killable(1);
> +	wait_event_timeout(oom_victims_wait, !atomic_read(&oom_victims), HZ);
>  
>  	return true;
>  }
> diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
> index c1224ba45548..9ce9c4c083a0 100644
> --- a/mm/page_alloc.c
> +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
> @@ -2330,30 +2330,29 @@ void warn_alloc_failed(gfp_t gfp_mask, int order, const char *fmt, ...)
>  }
>  
>  static inline struct page *
> -__alloc_pages_may_oom(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order,
> +__alloc_pages_may_oom(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order, int alloc_flags,
>  	const struct alloc_context *ac, unsigned long *did_some_progress)
>  {
> -	struct page *page;
> +	struct page *page = NULL;
>  
>  	*did_some_progress = 0;
>  
>  	/*
> -	 * Acquire the oom lock.  If that fails, somebody else is
> -	 * making progress for us.
> +	 * This allocating task can become the OOM victim itself at
> +	 * any point before acquiring the lock.  In that case, exit
> +	 * quickly and don't block on the lock held by another task
> +	 * waiting for us to exit.
>  	 */
> -	if (!mutex_trylock(&oom_lock)) {
> -		*did_some_progress = 1;
> -		schedule_timeout_uninterruptible(1);
> -		return NULL;
> +	if (test_thread_flag(TIF_MEMDIE) || mutex_lock_killable(&oom_lock)) {
> +		alloc_flags |= ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS;
> +		goto alloc;
>  	}
>  
>  	/*
> -	 * Go through the zonelist yet one more time, keep very high watermark
> -	 * here, this is only to catch a parallel oom killing, we must fail if
> -	 * we're still under heavy pressure.
> +	 * While we have been waiting for the lock, the previous OOM
> +	 * kill might have released enough memory for the both of us.
>  	 */
> -	page = get_page_from_freelist(gfp_mask | __GFP_HARDWALL, order,
> -					ALLOC_WMARK_HIGH|ALLOC_CPUSET, ac);
> +	page = get_page_from_freelist(gfp_mask, order, alloc_flags, ac);
>  	if (page)
>  		goto out;
>  
> @@ -2383,12 +2382,20 @@ __alloc_pages_may_oom(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order,
>  		if (gfp_mask & __GFP_THISNODE)
>  			goto out;
>  	}
> -	/* Exhausted what can be done so it's blamo time */
> -	if (out_of_memory(ac->zonelist, gfp_mask, order, ac->nodemask, false)
> -			|| WARN_ON_ONCE(gfp_mask & __GFP_NOFAIL))
> +
> +	if (out_of_memory(ac->zonelist, gfp_mask, order, ac->nodemask, false)) {
>  		*did_some_progress = 1;
> +	} else {
> +		/* Oops, these shouldn't happen with the OOM killer disabled */
> +		if (WARN_ON_ONCE(gfp_mask & __GFP_NOFAIL))
> +			*did_some_progress = 1;
> +	}
>  out:
>  	mutex_unlock(&oom_lock);
> +alloc:
> +	if (!page)
> +		page = get_page_from_freelist(gfp_mask, order, alloc_flags, ac);
> +
>  	return page;
>  }
>  
> @@ -2775,7 +2782,8 @@ __alloc_pages_slowpath(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order,
>  	}
>  
>  	/* Reclaim has failed us, start killing things */
> -	page = __alloc_pages_may_oom(gfp_mask, order, ac, &did_some_progress);
> +	page = __alloc_pages_may_oom(gfp_mask, order, alloc_flags, ac,
> +				     &did_some_progress);
>  	if (page)
>  		goto got_pg;
>  
> -- 
> 2.3.3
> 

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs

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