Re: [RFC] Per file OOM badness

Michal Hocko
2018-01-18T17:00:08Z

On Thu 18-01-18 11:47:48, Andrey Grodzovsky wrote:
> Hi, this series is a revised version of an RFC sent by Christian Konig
> a few years ago. The original RFC can be found at
> https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2015-September/089778.html
>
> This is the same idea and I've just adressed his concern from the original RFC
> and switched to a callback into file_ops instead of a new member in struct file.

Please add the full description to the cover letter and do not make
people hunt links.

Here is the origin cover letter text
: I'm currently working on the issue that when device drivers allocate memory on
: behalf of an application the OOM killer usually doesn't knew about that unless
: the application also get this memory mapped into their address space.
:
: This is especially annoying for graphics drivers where a lot of the VRAM
: usually isn't CPU accessible and so doesn't make sense to map into the
: address space of the process using it.
:
: The problem now is that when an application starts to use a lot of VRAM those
: buffers objects sooner or later get swapped out to system memory, but when we
: now run into an out of memory situation the OOM killer obviously doesn't knew
: anything about that memory and so usually kills the wrong process.
:
: The following set of patches tries to address this problem by introducing a per
: file OOM badness score, which device drivers can use to give the OOM killer a
: hint how many resources are bound to a file descriptor so that it can make
: better decisions which process to kill.
:
: So question at every one: What do you think about this approach?
:
: My biggest concern right now is the patches are messing with a core kernel
: structure (adding a field to struct file). Any better idea? I'm considering
: to put a callback into file_ops instead.

--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs