From: Shakeel Butt <shakeel.butt@linux.dev>
To: Tao Cui <cui.tao@linux.dev>
Cc: tj@kernel.org, akpm@linux-foundation.org, mhocko@suse.com,
mhocko@kernel.org, mkoutny@suse.com, hannes@cmpxchg.org,
roman.gushchin@linux.dev, muchun.song@linux.dev,
linux-mm@kvack.org, cgroups@vger.kernel.org,
linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Tao Cui <cuitao@kylinos.cn>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] docs: cgroup: document empty-write behavior of memory limit knobs
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:45:54 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <ao9eZmOucnSWS9ID@linux.dev> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20260826021753.197871-1-cui.tao@linux.dev>
On Wed, Aug 26, 2026 at 10:17:53AM +0800, Tao Cui wrote:
> From: Tao Cui <cuitao@kylinos.cn>
>
> A maintenance script on a cluster wrote an unset variable into
> memory.max of a workload cgroup; the variable expanded to an empty
> string, the write succeeded, and the workload in the cgroup was
> OOM-killed. Nothing pointed back at the write, so it took quite
> some time to trace the OOM kills to that script.
>
> The memory controller documentation does not say what an empty
> write does; the cpuset controller documents its empty-value
> semantics. The actual behavior is that the empty string is
> accepted as 0. Reproduced on a k8s cluster (v1.29, cgroup v2,
> two-container pod, 384M limit):
>
> # LIMIT=
> # echo "$LIMIT" > $CG/memory.max
> # echo $?
> 0
>
> m6demo 0/2 OOMKilled 0
>
> Memory cgroup out of memory: Killed process 339529 (sleep) ... anon-rss:32kB
>
> State it where the interface files are introduced, alongside the
> existing notes on units and page rounding.
>
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/aoVUlFdZYLFn_gvJ@tiehlicka/
> Signed-off-by: Tao Cui <cuitao@kylinos.cn>
Acked-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeel.butt@linux.dev>
prev parent reply other threads:[~2026-08-26 21:46 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2026-08-26 2:17 [PATCH v2] docs: cgroup: document empty-write behavior of memory limit knobs Tao Cui
2026-08-26 19:57 ` Michal Hocko
2026-08-26 21:45 ` Shakeel Butt [this message]
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