Re: [PATCH] mm: memcontrol: fix occasional OOMs due to proportional memory.low reclaim

Roman Gushchin
2021-08-17T19:45:18Z

On Tue, Aug 17, 2021 at 02:05:06PM -0400, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> We've noticed occasional OOM killing when memory.low settings are in
> effect for cgroups. This is unexpected and undesirable as memory.low
> is supposed to express non-OOMing memory priorities between cgroups.
>
> The reason for this is proportional memory.low reclaim. When cgroups
> are below their memory.low threshold, reclaim passes them over in the
> first round, and then retries if it couldn't find pages anywhere else.
> But when cgroups are slighly above their memory.low setting, page scan
> force is scaled down and diminished in proportion to the overage, to
> the point where it can cause reclaim to fail as well - only in that
> case we currently don't retry, and instead trigger OOM.
>
> To fix this, hook proportional reclaim into the same retry logic we
> have in place for when cgroups are skipped entirely. This way if
> reclaim fails and some cgroups were scanned with dimished pressure,
> we'll try another full-force cycle before giving up and OOMing.
>
> Reported-by: Leon Yang <lnyng-b10kYP2dOMg@public.gmane.org>
> Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes-druUgvl0LCNAfugRpC6u6w@public.gmane.org>

Acked-by: Roman Gushchin <guro-b10kYP2dOMg@public.gmane.org>

I guess it's a stable material, so maybe adding:
Fixes: 9783aa9917f8 ("mm, memcg: proportional memory.{low,min} reclaim")

?

Thanks!