Re: [RFC][PATCHv6 00/12] printk: introduce printing kernel thread

Tejun Heo
2018-01-09T22:54:01Z

Hello, Steven.

On Tue, Jan 09, 2018 at 05:47:50PM -0500, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > Maybe it can break out eventually but that can take a really long
> > time. It's OOM. Most of userland is waiting for reclaim. There
> > isn't all that much going on outside that and there can only be one
> > CPU which is OOMing. The kernel isn't gonna be all that chatty.
>
> Are you saying that the OOM is stuck printing over and over on a single
> CPU. Perhaps we should fix THAT.

I'm not sure what you meant but OOM code isn't doing anything bad
other than excluding others from doing OOM kills simultaneously, which
is what we want, and printing a lot of messages and then gets caught
up in a positive feedback loop.

To me, the whole point of this effort is preventing printk messages
from causing significant or critical disruptions to overall system
operation. IOW, it's rather dumb if the machine goes down because
somebody printk'd wrong or just failed to foresee the combinations of
events which could lead to such conditions.

It's not like we don't know how to fix this either.

Thanks.

--
tejun