Re: [PATCH 1/5] mm, oom: introduce oom reaper

[Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>]

On Wed 03-02-16 15:48:18, David Rientjes wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Feb 2016, Michal Hocko wrote:
> 
> > From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
> > 
> > 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).
> > 
> > Chnages since v4
> > - drop MAX_RT_PRIO-1 as per David - memcg/cpuset/mempolicy OOM killing
> >   might interfere with the rest of the system
> > Changes since v3
> > - many style/compile fixups by Andrew
> > - unmap_mapping_range_tree needs full initialization of zap_details
> >   to prevent from missing unmaps and follow up BUG_ON during truncate
> >   resp. misaccounting - Kirill/Andrew
> > - exclude mlocked pages because they need an explicit munlock by Kirill
> > - use subsys_initcall instead of module_init - Paul Gortmaker
> > - do not tear down mm if it is shared with the global init because this
> >   could lead to SEGV and panic - Tetsuo
> > Changes since v2
> > - fix mm_count refernce leak reported by Tetsuo
> > - make sure oom_reaper_th is NULL after kthread_run fails - Tetsuo
> > - use wait_event_freezable rather than open coded wait loop - suggested
> >   by Tetsuo
> > Changes since v1
> > - fix the screwed up detail->check_swap_entries - Johannes
> > - do not use kthread_should_stop because that would need a cleanup
> >   and we do not have anybody to stop us - Tetsuo
> > - move wake_oom_reaper to oom_kill_process because we have to wait
> >   for all tasks sharing the same mm to get killed - Tetsuo
> > - do not reap mm structs which are shared with unkillable tasks - Tetsuo
> > 
> > Suggested-by: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
> > Suggested-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
> > Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
> > Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
> 
> Acked-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>

Thanks!
 
> I think all the patches could really have been squashed together because 
> subsequent patches just overwrite already added code. 

The primary reason is a better bisectability and incremental nature of
changes.

> I was going to 
> suggest not doing atomic_inc(&mm->mm_count) in wake_oom_reaper() and 
> change oom_kill_process() to do

I found it easier to follow the reference counting that way (pin the mm
at the place when I hand over it to the async thread).

> 
> 	if (can_oom_reap)
> 		wake_oom_reaper(mm);
> 	else
> 		mmdrop(mm);
> 
> but I see that we don't even touch mm->mm_count after the third patch.

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs

--
To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in
the body to majordomo@kvack.org.  For more info on Linux MM,
see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ .
Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@kvack.org"> email@kvack.org </a>