Re: [v8 0/4] cgroup-aware OOM killer

Roman Gushchin
2017-09-15T15:23:01Z

On Fri, Sep 15, 2017 at 12:58:26PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Thu 14-09-17 09:05:48, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 03:40:14PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > On Wed 13-09-17 14:56:07, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 02:29:14PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > > > I strongly believe that comparing only leaf memcgs
> > > > > is more straightforward and it doesn't lead to unexpected results as
> > > > > mentioned before (kill a small memcg which is a part of the larger
> > > > > sub-hierarchy).
> > > >
> > > > One of two main goals of this patchset is to introduce cgroup-level
> > > > fairness: bigger cgroups should be affected more than smaller,
> > > > despite the size of tasks inside. I believe the same principle
> > > > should be used for cgroups.
> > >
> > > Yes bigger cgroups should be preferred but I fail to see why bigger
> > > hierarchies should be considered as well if they are not kill-all. And
> > > whether non-leaf memcgs should allow kill-all is not entirely clear to
> > > me. What would be the usecase?
> >
> > We definitely want to support kill-all for non-leaf cgroups.
> > A workload can consist of several cgroups and we want to clean up
> > the whole thing on OOM.
>
> Could you be more specific about such a workload? E.g. how can be such a
> hierarchy handled consistently when its sub-tree gets killed due to
> internal memory pressure?

Or just system-wide OOM.

> Or do you expect that none of the subtree will
> have hard limit configured?

And this can also be a case: the whole workload may have hard limit
configured, while internal memcgs have only memory.low set for "soft"
prioritization.

>
> But then you just enforce a structural restriction on your configuration
> because
> root
> / \
> A D
> /\
> B C
>
> is a different thing than
> root
> / | \
> B C D
>

I actually don't have a strong argument against an approach to select
largest leaf or kill-all-set memcg. I think, in practice there will be
no much difference.

The only real concern I have is that then we have to do the same with
oom_priorities (select largest priority tree-wide), and this will limit
an ability to enforce the priority by parent cgroup.

Thanks!