Re: [v4 2/4] mm, oom: cgroup-aware OOM killer

Roman Gushchin
2017-08-01T18:14:25Z

On Tue, Aug 01, 2017 at 07:03:03PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Tue 01-08-17 16:25:48, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 01, 2017 at 04:54:35PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> [...]
> > > I would reap out the oom_kill_process into a separate patch.
> >
> > It was a separate patch, I've merged it based on Vladimir's feedback.
> > No problems, I can divide it back.
>
> It would make the review slightly more easier
> >
> > > > -static void oom_kill_process(struct oom_control *oc, const char *message)
> > > > +static void __oom_kill_process(struct task_struct *victim)
> > >
> > > To the rest of the patch. I have to say I do not quite like how it is
> > > implemented. I was hoping for something much simpler which would hook
> > > into oom_evaluate_task. If a task belongs to a memcg with kill-all flag
> > > then we would update the cumulative memcg badness (more specifically the
> > > badness of the topmost parent with kill-all flag). Memcg will then
> > > compete with existing self contained tasks (oom_badness will have to
> > > tell whether points belong to a task or a memcg to allow the caller to
> > > deal with it). But it shouldn't be much more complex than that.
> >
> > I'm not sure, it will be any simpler. Basically I'm doing the same:
> > the difference is that you want to iterate over tasks and for each
> > task traverse the memcg tree, update per-cgroup oom score and find
> > the corresponding memcg(s) with the kill-all flag. I'm doing the opposite:
> > traverse the cgroup tree, and for each leaf cgroup iterate over processes.
>
> Yeah but this doesn't fit very well to the existing scheme so we would
> need two different schemes which is not ideal from maint. point of view.
> We also do not have to duplicate all the tricky checks we already do in
> oom_evaluate_task. So I would prefer if we could try to hook there and
> do the special handling there.

I hope, that iterating over all tasks just to check if there are
in-flight OOM victims might be optimized at some point.
That means, we would be able to choose a victim much cheaper.
It's not easy, but it feels as a right direction to go.

Also, adding new tricks to the oom_evaluate_task() will make the code
even more hairy. Some of the existing tricks are useless for memcg selection.

>
> > Also, please note, that even without the kill-all flag the decision is made
> > on per-cgroup level (except tasks in the root cgroup).
>
> Yeah and I am not sure this is a reasonable behavior. Why should we
> consider memcgs which are not kill-all as a single entity?

I think, it's reasonable to choose a cgroup/container to blow off based on
the cgroup oom_priority/size (including hierarchical settings), and then
kill one biggest or all tasks depending on cgroup settings.

Thanks!