[PATCH] memcg: bypass the reclaim and oom killer for dying tasks once oom_reaper is done

[PATCH] memcg: bypass the reclaim and oom killer for dying tasks once oom_reaper is done

[Shakeel Butt]

At Meta, we are seeing instances where an OOM killed job is stuck in the
exit path for several hours. In one particular case, the job was stuck
for more than 8 hours and I had to manually remove the memory.max limits
to allow the process to exit.

The job was a single process job and had ~55 GiB memory.max and zswap
enabled. It had almost 0 anon in memory and ~111 GiB in zswap compressed
to ~51 GiB zswap pool (i.e. almost all of memory.current was zswap).
Nothing was left on the LRUs to reclaim.

On further inspection, I observed ~20k threads of that process stuck
with the following stack:

[<0>] mem_cgroup_out_of_memory+0x4e/0xa0
[<0>] charge_memcg+0x8bf/0x990
[<0>] mem_cgroup_swapin_charge_folio+0x4e/0x80
[<0>] __read_swap_cache_async+0x10c/0x260
[<0>] swapin_readahead+0x116/0x3f0
[<0>] do_swap_page+0x13c/0x1ce0
[<0>] handle_mm_fault+0x61d/0x11f0
[<0>] do_user_addr_fault+0x3e7/0x6d0
[<0>] exc_page_fault+0x8f/0x110
[<0>] asm_exc_page_fault+0x22/0x30
[<0>] __get_user_8+0x14/0x20
[<0>] futex_cleanup+0x27/0x1c0
[<0>] futex_exit_release+0x47/0x60
[<0>] do_exit+0x107/0x940
[<0>] do_group_exit+0x81/0xa0
[<0>] get_signal+0x2b1/0x6e0
[<0>] arch_do_signal_or_restart+0x1a/0x1c0
[<0>] exit_to_user_mode_loop+0xa8/0x1c0
[<0>] do_syscall_64+0x152/0x250
[<0>] entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x4b/0x53

In addition the dmesg was filled with "Out of memory and no killable
processes..." messages.

I have no idea why oom reaper was not able to reap/unmap the process. My
guess is that since oom reaper tries to acquire mmap_lock in read mode
limited number of times and then gives up, there might be a thread of
that process which had mmap_lock in write mode at that time.

My initial suspicion was the futex_cleanup and kernel page fault causing
infinite fault and charge retries but that was put to rest in previous
discussions happened on similar problem [1].

My current theory is that it is just a simple slow serialization behind
the oom_lock. Unlike page allocator, memcg charge code takes the
oom_lock without the "try". Though memcg oom code uses
mutex_lock_killable(), note that in the call stack get_signal() consumes
SIGKILL (or sigdelset(SIGKILL)) before calling do_group_exit(). So this
mutex_lock_killable() is just a mutex_lock() here. Therefore 10s of
thousands of threads are waiting on oom_lock and one by one they get
-EFAULT from get_user() in the futex cleanup code and bails out.

Discussion from [1] lead to the commit a75ffa26122b ("memcg, oom: do not
bypass oom killer for dying tasks") which routes dying tasks into the OOM
path precisely so the oom_reaper can reap their mm and free the memory
asynchronously. But the reaper is best-effort and one-shot: if it cannot
take mmap_lock for read (e.g. a sibling thread holds it for write) it
sets MMF_OOM_SKIP and never retries, leaving only the glacial
oom_lock-serialized synchronous drain.

Once MMF_OOM_SKIP is set there is no more asynchronous reclaim coming for
the mm, so a dying task charging against it has nothing left to wait for:
it frees its memory only once it finishes exiting. Running reclaim and the
(no-victim) OOM killer for it is then pointless, and doing it for 10s of
thousands of exiting threads is what serializes them behind oom_lock. So
before reclaim, if current is an OOM victim whose reaper is done, fail the
charge.

Reproduced with 20k threads, each parking a robust futex head on
its own zswapped page, OOM-group-killed while a sibling holds mmap_lock
for write so the reaper gives up and sets MMF_OOM_SKIP. Tested on
next-20260728 and baseline show ~90 seconds exit time while with the
patch the exit time reduced to ~3 seconds.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/7a4e5591f45df455e6a485fc5400989569d3d22d.camel@surriel.com/ [1]
Signed-off-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeel.butt@linux.dev>
---
 mm/memcontrol.c | 13 +++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+)

diff --git a/mm/memcontrol.c b/mm/memcontrol.c
index 8319ad8c5c23..f7a5f8a6cfee 100644
--- a/mm/memcontrol.c
+++ b/mm/memcontrol.c
@@ -2653,6 +2653,19 @@ static int try_charge_memcg(struct mem_cgroup *memcg, gfp_t gfp_mask,
 	if (!gfpflags_allow_blocking(gfp_mask))
 		goto nomem;
 
+	/*
+	 * OOM victim still needs to charge memory to exit. OOM reaper should
+	 * help but it might fail on mmap_lock contention. If the victim is a
+	 * large thread group then all exiting threads might compete on oom_lock
+	 * just to learn that there is nothing really killable anymore. Bail
+	 * out early and fail the charge to expedite their exit. They are
+	 * considered fully reclaimed by the oom reaper and they shouldn't
+	 * contribute further charges.
+	 */
+	if (tsk_is_oom_victim(current) &&
+	    mm_flags_test(MMF_OOM_SKIP, current->signal->oom_mm))
+		goto nomem;
+
 	__memcg_memory_event(mem_over_limit, MEMCG_MAX, allow_spinning);
 	raised_max_event = true;
 
-- 
2.53.0-Meta

Re: [PATCH] memcg: bypass the reclaim and oom killer for dying tasks once oom_reaper is done

[Johannes Weiner]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2026 at 07:46:12PM -0700, Shakeel Butt wrote:
> At Meta, we are seeing instances where an OOM killed job is stuck in the
> exit path for several hours. In one particular case, the job was stuck
> for more than 8 hours and I had to manually remove the memory.max limits
> to allow the process to exit.
> 
> The job was a single process job and had ~55 GiB memory.max and zswap
> enabled. It had almost 0 anon in memory and ~111 GiB in zswap compressed
> to ~51 GiB zswap pool (i.e. almost all of memory.current was zswap).
> Nothing was left on the LRUs to reclaim.
> 
> On further inspection, I observed ~20k threads of that process stuck
> with the following stack:
> 
> [<0>] mem_cgroup_out_of_memory+0x4e/0xa0
> [<0>] charge_memcg+0x8bf/0x990
> [<0>] mem_cgroup_swapin_charge_folio+0x4e/0x80
> [<0>] __read_swap_cache_async+0x10c/0x260
> [<0>] swapin_readahead+0x116/0x3f0
> [<0>] do_swap_page+0x13c/0x1ce0
> [<0>] handle_mm_fault+0x61d/0x11f0
> [<0>] do_user_addr_fault+0x3e7/0x6d0
> [<0>] exc_page_fault+0x8f/0x110
> [<0>] asm_exc_page_fault+0x22/0x30
> [<0>] __get_user_8+0x14/0x20
> [<0>] futex_cleanup+0x27/0x1c0
> [<0>] futex_exit_release+0x47/0x60
> [<0>] do_exit+0x107/0x940
> [<0>] do_group_exit+0x81/0xa0
> [<0>] get_signal+0x2b1/0x6e0
> [<0>] arch_do_signal_or_restart+0x1a/0x1c0
> [<0>] exit_to_user_mode_loop+0xa8/0x1c0
> [<0>] do_syscall_64+0x152/0x250
> [<0>] entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x4b/0x53
> 
> In addition the dmesg was filled with "Out of memory and no killable
> processes..." messages.
> 
> I have no idea why oom reaper was not able to reap/unmap the process. My
> guess is that since oom reaper tries to acquire mmap_lock in read mode
> limited number of times and then gives up, there might be a thread of
> that process which had mmap_lock in write mode at that time.
> 
> My initial suspicion was the futex_cleanup and kernel page fault causing
> infinite fault and charge retries but that was put to rest in previous
> discussions happened on similar problem [1].
> 
> My current theory is that it is just a simple slow serialization behind
> the oom_lock. Unlike page allocator, memcg charge code takes the
> oom_lock without the "try". Though memcg oom code uses
> mutex_lock_killable(), note that in the call stack get_signal() consumes
> SIGKILL (or sigdelset(SIGKILL)) before calling do_group_exit(). So this
> mutex_lock_killable() is just a mutex_lock() here. Therefore 10s of
> thousands of threads are waiting on oom_lock and one by one they get
> -EFAULT from get_user() in the futex cleanup code and bails out.
> 
> Discussion from [1] lead to the commit a75ffa26122b ("memcg, oom: do not
> bypass oom killer for dying tasks") which routes dying tasks into the OOM
> path precisely so the oom_reaper can reap their mm and free the memory
> asynchronously. But the reaper is best-effort and one-shot: if it cannot
> take mmap_lock for read (e.g. a sibling thread holds it for write) it
> sets MMF_OOM_SKIP and never retries, leaving only the glacial
> oom_lock-serialized synchronous drain.
> 
> Once MMF_OOM_SKIP is set there is no more asynchronous reclaim coming for
> the mm, so a dying task charging against it has nothing left to wait for:
> it frees its memory only once it finishes exiting. Running reclaim and the
> (no-victim) OOM killer for it is then pointless, and doing it for 10s of
> thousands of exiting threads is what serializes them behind oom_lock. So
> before reclaim, if current is an OOM victim whose reaper is done, fail the
> charge.
> 
> Reproduced with 20k threads, each parking a robust futex head on
> its own zswapped page, OOM-group-killed while a sibling holds mmap_lock
> for write so the reaper gives up and sets MMF_OOM_SKIP. Tested on
> next-20260728 and baseline show ~90 seconds exit time while with the
> patch the exit time reduced to ~3 seconds.
> 
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/7a4e5591f45df455e6a485fc5400989569d3d22d.camel@surriel.com/ [1]
> Signed-off-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeel.butt@linux.dev>

Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>