Re: [PATCH 1/1] mm: vmstat: Add OOM kill count in vmstat counter

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Wed 07-10-15 20:18:16, PINTU KUMAR wrote:
[...]
> Ok, let me explain the real case that we have experienced.
> In our case, we have low memory killer in user space itself that invoked based
> on some memory threshold.
> Something like, below 100MB threshold starting killing until it comes back to
> 150MB.
> During our long duration ageing test (more than 72 hours) we observed that many
> applications are killed.
> Now, we were not sure if killing happens in user space or kernel space.
> When we saw the kernel logs, it generated many logs such as;
> /var/log/{messages, messages.0, messages.1, messages.2, messages.3, etc.}
> But, none of the logs contains kernel OOM messages. Although there were some LMK
> kill in user space.
> Then in another round of test we keep dumping _dmesg_ output to a file after
> each iteration.
> After 3 days of tests this time we observed that dmesg output dump contains many
> kernel oom messages.

I am confused. So you suspect that the OOM report didn't get to
/var/log/messages while it was in dmesg?

> Now, every time this dumping is not feasible. And instead of counting manually
> in log file, we wanted to know number of oom kills happened during this tests.
> So we decided to add a counter in /proc/vmstat to track the kernel oom_kill, and
> monitor it during our ageing test.
>
> Basically, we wanted to tune our user space LMK killer for different threshold
> values, so that we can completely avoid the kernel oom kill.
> So, just by looking into this counter, we could able to tune the LMK threshold
> values without depending on the kernel log messages.

Wouldn't a trace point suit you better for this particular use case
considering this is a testing environment?
 
> Also, in most of the system /var/log/messages are not present and we just
> depends on kernel dmesg output, which is petty small for longer run.
> Even if we reduce the loglevel to 4, it may not be suitable to capture all logs.

Hmm, I would consider a logless system considerably crippled but I see
your point and I can imagine that especially small devices might try
to save every single B of the storage. Such a system is basically
undebugable IMO but it still might be interesting to see OOM killer
traces.
 
> > What is even more confusing is the mixing of memcg and global oom
> > conditions.  They are really different things. Memcg API will even
> > give you notification about the OOM event.
> > 
> Ok, you are suggesting to divide the oom_kill counter into 2 parts (global &
> memcg) ?
> May be something like:
> nr_oom_victims
> nr_memcg_oom_victims

You do not need the later. Memcg interface already provides you with a
notification API and if a counter is _really_ needed then it should be
per-memcg not a global cumulative number.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs

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