Re: Let's talk about the elephant in the room - the Linux kernel's inability to gracefully handle low memory pressure

From: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
To: James Courtier-Dutton <james.dutton@gmail.com>
Cc: Daniel Drake <drake@endlessm.com>,
	"Artem S. Tashkinov" <aros@gmx.com>,
	LKML Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	linux@endlessm.com, hadess@hadess.net,
	Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Subject: Re: Let's talk about the elephant in the room - the Linux kernel's inability to gracefully handle low memory pressure
Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2019 22:15:53 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20190902201553.GA6546@bug> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAAMvbhH=ftMoh9eFVR3YgN9DVSLaN5tXa-vTsBocY8YuL0Rc1A@mail.gmail.com>

Hi!

> >
> > And if there is a meaningful way to make the kernel behave better, that would
> > obviously be of huge value too.
> >
> > Thanks
> > Daniel
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Is there a way for an application to be told that there is a memory
> pressure situation?
> For example, say I do a "make -j32"  and half way through the compile
> it hits a memory pressure situation.
> If make could have been told about it. It could give up on some of the
> parallel compiles, and instead proceed as if the user have typed "make
> -j4". It could then re-try the failed compile parts, that failed due
> to memory pressure.
> I know all applications won't be this clever, but providing a kernel
> API so that an application could do something about it, if the
> programmer of that application has thought about it.

Support is not really needed in many applications. It would be nice to
have for make and web browsers... And I suspect it is easy to do interface
becomes available.

Best regards,
								Pavel