Re: [patch] mm, oom: prevent additional oom kills before memory is freed

[David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>]

On Thu, 15 Jun 2017, Tetsuo Handa wrote:

> David is trying to avoid setting MMF_OOM_SKIP when the OOM reaper found that
> mm->users == 0.

Yes, because MMF_OOM_SKIP enables the oom killer to select another process 
to kill and will do so without the original victim's mm being able to 
undergo exit_mmap().  So now we kill two or more processes when one would 
have sufficied; I have seen up to four processes killed unnecessarily 
without this patch.

> But we must not wait forever because __mmput() might fail to
> release some memory immediately. If __mmput() did not release some memory within
> schedule_timeout_idle(HZ/10) * MAX_OOM_REAP_RETRIES sleep, let the OOM killer
> invoke again. So, this is the case we want to address here, isn't it?
> 

It is obviously a function of the number of threads that share the mm with 
the oom victim to determine how long would be a sensible amount of time to 
wait for __mmput() to even get a chance to be called, along with 
potentially allowing a non-zero number of those threads to allocate from 
memory reserves to allow them to eventually drop mm->mmap_sem to make 
forward progress.

I have not witnessed any thread stalling in __mmput() that prevents the 
mm's memory to be freed.  I have witnessed several processes oom killed 
unnecessarily for a single oom condition where before MMF_OOM_SKIP was 
introduced, a single oom kill would have sufficed.

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