Re: System freezes after OOM

[David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>]

On Mon, 18 Jul 2016, Michal Hocko wrote:

> > There's 
> > two fundamental ways to go about it: (1) ensure mempool_alloc() can make 
> > forward progress (whether that's by way of gfp flags or access to memory 
> > reserves, which may depend on the process context such as PF_MEMALLOC) or 
> > (2) rely on an implementation detail of mempools to never access memory 
> > reserves, although it is shown to not livelock systems on 4.7 and earlier 
> > kernels, and instead rely on users of the same mempool to return elements 
> > to the freelist in all contexts, including oom contexts.  The mempool 
> > implementation itself shouldn't need any oom awareness, that should be a 
> > page allocator issue.
> 
> OK, I agree that we have a certain layer violation here. __GFP_NOMEMALLOC at
> the mempool level is kind of hack (like the whole existence of the
> flag TBH). So if you believe that the OOM part should be handled at the
> page allocator level then that has already been proposed
> http://lkml.kernel.org/r/2d5e1f84-e886-7b98-cb11-170d7104fd13@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp
> and not welcome because it might have other side effects as _all_
> __GFP_NOMEMALLOC users would be affected.
> 

__GFP_NOMEMALLOC is opt-in and is a workaround for PF_MEMALLOC in this 
context to prevent a depletion of reserves, so it seems trivial to allow 
mempool_alloc(__GFP_NOMEMALLOC) in contexts where it's needed and leave it 
to the user.

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