Re: [rfc patch] mm, oom: fix unnecessary killing of additional processes

[Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@i-love.sakura.ne.jp>]

On 2018/06/05 17:57, Michal Hocko wrote:
>> For this reason, we see testing harnesses often oom killed immediately 
>> after running a unittest that stresses reclaim or compaction by inducing a 
>> system-wide oom condition.  The harness spawns the unittest which spawns 
>> an antagonist memory hog that is intended to be oom killed.  When memory 
>> is mlocked or there are a large number of threads faulting memory for the 
>> antagonist, the unittest and the harness itself get oom killed because the 
>> oom reaper sets MMF_OOM_SKIP; this ends up happening a lot on powerpc.  
>> The memory hog has mm->mmap_sem readers queued ahead of a writer that is 
>> doing mmap() so the oom reaper can't grab the sem quickly enough.
> 
> How come the writer doesn't back off. mmap paths should be taking an
> exclusive mmap sem in killable sleep so it should back off. Or is the
> holder of the lock deep inside mmap path doing something else and not
> backing out with the exclusive lock held?
> 
 
Here is an example where the writer doesn't back off.

  http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180607150546.1c7db21f70221008e14b8bb8@linux-foundation.org

down_write_killable(&mm->mmap_sem) is nothing but increasing the possibility of
successfully back off. There is no guarantee that the owner of that exclusive
mmap sem will not be blocked by other unkillable waits.