Re: OOM killer even when not overcommiting

[Sasha Levin <levinsasha928@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 10:04 PM, Andrew Morton
<akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 21:58:26 +0200
> Sasha Levin <levinsasha928@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>
>> I assumed that when setting overcommit_memory=2 and
>> overcommit_ratio<100 that the OOM killer won't ever get invoked (since
>> we're not overcommiting memory), but it looks like I'm mistaken since
>> apparently a simple mmap from userspace will trigger the OOM killer if
>> it requests more memory than available.
>>
>> Is it how it's supposed to work?  Why does it resort to OOM killing
>> instead of just failing the allocation?
>>
>> Here is the dump I get when the OOM kicks in:
>>
>> ...
>>
>> [ 3108.730350]  [<ffffffff81198e4a>] mlock_vma_pages_range+0x9a/0xa0
>> [ 3108.734486]  [<ffffffff8119b75b>] mmap_region+0x28b/0x510
>> ...
>
> The vma is mlocked for some reason - presumably the app is using
> mlockall() or mlock()?  So the kernel is trying to instantiate all the
> pages at mmap() time.

The app may have used mlock(), but there is no swap space on the
machine (it's also a KVM guest), so it should matter, no?

Regardless, why doesn't it result in mmap() failing quietly, instead
of kicking in the OOM killer to kill the entire process?

--
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/ .
Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/
Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@kvack.org"> email@kvack.org </a>