Re: [patch 2/2] mm, memcg: add memory.oom_control notification for system oom

[David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>]

On Mon, 18 Nov 2013, Michal Hocko wrote:

> > A subset of applications that wait on memory.oom_control don't disable
> > the oom killer for that memcg and simply log or cleanup after the kernel
> > oom killer kills a process to free memory.
> > 
> > We need the ability to do this for system oom conditions as well, i.e.
> > when the system is depleted of all memory and must kill a process.  For
> > convenience, this can use memcg since oom notifiers are already present.
> 
> Using the memcg interface for "read-only" interface without any plan for
> the "write" is only halfway solution. We want to handle global OOM in a
> more user defined ways but we have to agree on the proper interface
> first. I do not want to end up with something half baked with memcg and
> a different interface to do the real thing just because memcg turns out
> to be unsuitable.
> 

This patch isn't really a halfway solution, you can still determine if the 
open(O_WRONLY) succeeds or not to determine if that feature has been 
implemented.  I'm concerned about disabling the oom killer entirely for 
system oom conditions, though, so I didn't implement it to be writable.  I 
don't think we should be doing anything special in terms of "write" 
behavior for the root memcg memory.oom_control, so I'd argue against doing 
anything other than disabling the oom killer.  That's scary.

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