Re: [patch 6/7 -mm] oom: avoid oom killer for lowmem allocations

KOSAKI Motohiro
2010-02-15T08:29:36Z

> If memory has been depleted in lowmem zones even with the protection
> afforded to it by /proc/sys/vm/lowmem_reserve_ratio, it is unlikely that
> killing current users will help. The memory is either reclaimable (or
> migratable) already, in which case we should not invoke the oom killer at
> all, or it is pinned by an application for I/O. Killing such an
> application may leave the hardware in an unspecified state and there is
> no guarantee that it will be able to make a timely exit.
>
> Lowmem allocations are now failed in oom conditions so that the task can
> perhaps recover or try again later. Killing current is an unnecessary
> result for simply making a GFP_DMA or GFP_DMA32 page allocation and no
> lowmem allocations use the now-deprecated __GFP_NOFAIL bit so retrying is
> unnecessary.
>
> Previously, the heuristic provided some protection for those tasks with
> CAP_SYS_RAWIO, but this is no longer necessary since we will not be
> killing tasks for the purposes of ISA allocations.

The main difference of Kamezawasan's patch is, his patch treated DMA
zone is filled by mlocked page too.
but I personally think such case should be solved auto page migration
mechanism. (probably, mel's memory compaction patch provide its base
infrastructure). So this patch seems enough and proper.

Reviewed-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>

>
> Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
> ---
> mm/page_alloc.c | 3 +++
> 1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
> --- a/mm/page_alloc.c
> +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
> @@ -1914,6 +1914,9 @@ rebalance:
> * running out of options and have to consider going OOM
> */
> if (!did_some_progress) {
> + /* The oom killer won't necessarily free lowmem */
> + if (high_zoneidx < ZONE_NORMAL)
> + goto nopage;
> if ((gfp_mask & __GFP_FS) && !(gfp_mask & __GFP_NORETRY)) {
> if (oom_killer_disabled)
> goto nopage;
>
> --
> To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in
> the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM,
> see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ .
> Don't email: email@kvack.org