Re: [PATCH v2] memcg: allow exiting tasks to write back data to swap

[Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2025 at 07:13:07PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> Anyway, have you tried to reproduce with 
> diff --git a/mm/memcontrol.c b/mm/memcontrol.c
> index 7b3503d12aaf..9c30c442e3b0 100644
> --- a/mm/memcontrol.c
> +++ b/mm/memcontrol.c
> @@ -1627,7 +1627,7 @@ static bool mem_cgroup_out_of_memory(struct mem_cgroup *memcg, gfp_t gfp_mask,
>  	 * A few threads which were not waiting at mutex_lock_killable() can
>  	 * fail to bail out. Therefore, check again after holding oom_lock.
>  	 */
> -	ret = task_is_dying() || out_of_memory(&oc);
> +	ret = out_of_memory(&oc);
>  
>  unlock:
>  	mutex_unlock(&oom_lock);
> 
> proposed by Johannes earlier? This should help to trigger the oom reaper
> to free up some memory.

Yes, I was wondering about that too.

If the OOM reaper can be our reliable way of forward progress, we
don't need any reserve or headroom beyond memory.max.

IIRC it can fail if somebody is holding mmap_sem for writing. The exit
path at some point takes that, but also around the time it frees up
all its memory voluntarily, so that should be fine. Are you aware of
other scenarios where it can fail?

What if everything has been swapped out already and there is nothing
to reap? IOW, only unreclaimable/kernel memory remaining in the group.

It still seems to me that allowing the OOM victim (and only the OOM
victim) to bypass memory.max is the only guarantee to progress.

I'm not really concerned about side effects. Any runaway allocation in
the exit path (like the vmalloc one you referenced before) is a much
bigger concern for exceeding the physical OOM reserves in the page
allocator. What's a containment failure for cgroups would be a memory
deadlock at the system level. It's a class of kernel bug that needs
fixing, not something we can really work around in the cgroup code.