Re: [patch] mm, oom: prevent additional oom kills before memory is freed

[David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>]

On Fri, 16 Jun 2017, Michal Hocko wrote:

> I am sorry but I have really hard to make the oom reaper a reliable way
> to stop all the potential oom lockups go away. I do not want to
> reintroduce another potential lockup now.

Please show where this "potential lockup" ever existed in a bug report or 
a testcase?  I have never seen __mmput() block when trying to free the 
memory it maps.

> I also do not see why any
> solution should be rushed into. I have proposed a way to go and unless
> it is clear that this is not a way forward then I simply do not agree
> with any partial workarounds or shortcuts.

This is not a shortcut, it is a bug fix.  4.12 kills 1-4 processes 
unnecessarily as a result of setting MMF_OOM_SKIP incorrectly before the 
mm's memory can be freed.  If you have not seen this issue before, which 
is why you asked if I ever observed it in practice, then you have not 
stress tested oom reaping.  It is very observable and reproducible.  I do 
not agree that adding additional and obscure locking into __mmput() is the 
solution to what is plainly and obviously fixed with this simple patch.

4.12 needs to stop killing 2-5 processes on every oom condition instead of 
1.