Re: [patch] mm, memcg: add oom killer delay

[David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>]

On Fri, 14 Jun 2013, David Rientjes wrote:

> Even with all of the above (which is not actually that invasive of a 
> patch), I still think we need memory.oom_delay_millisecs.  I probably made 
> a mistake in describing what that is addressing if it seems like it's 
> trying to address any of the above.
> 
> If a userspace oom handler fails to respond even with access to those 
> "memcg reserves", the kernel needs to kill within that memcg.  Do we do 
> that above a set time period (this patch) or when the reserves are 
> completely exhausted?  That's debatable, but if we are to allow it for 
> global oom conditions as well then my opinion was to make it as safe as 
> possible; today, we can't disable the global oom killer from userspace and 
> I don't think we should ever allow it to be disabled.  I think we should 
> allow userspace a reasonable amount of time to respond and then kill if it 
> is exceeded.
> 
> For the global oom case, we want to have a priority-based memcg selection.  
> Select the lowest priority top-level memcg and kill within it.  If it has 
> an oom notifier, send it a signal to kill something.  If it fails to 
> react, kill something after memory.oom_delay_millisecs has elapsed.  If 
> there isn't a userspace oom notifier, kill something within that lowest 
> priority memcg.
> 
> The bottomline with my approach is that I don't believe there is ever a 
> reason for an oom memcg to remain oom indefinitely.  That's why I hate 
> memory.oom_control == 1 and I think for the global notification it would 
> be deemed a nonstarter since you couldn't even login to the machine.
> 

What's the status of this patch?  I'd love to be able to introduce memcg 
reserves so that userspace oom notifications can actually work, but we 
still require a failsafe in the kernel if those reserves are depleted or 
userspace cannot respond.

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