Re: [PATCH] fix spurious OOM kills

From: Thomas Gleixner
Date: Fri Nov 19 2004 - 11:32:57 EST


On Fri, 2004-11-19 at 06:09 -0200, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> As Thomas Gleixner has investigated, the OOM killer selection is problematic.
>
> When testing your ignore-page-referenced patch it first killed the memory hog
> then shortly afterwards the shell I was running it on.
>
> You've seen Thomas emails, he has nice description there.

I had another go on 2.6.10-rc2-mm2.

The reentrancy blocking and the additional test of freepages in
out_of_memory() make all the ugly time and counter checks superfluid.

I think they were neccecary to make the spurious kill triggering less
obvious. :)

Can somebody else check with his test cases, if the behaviour is
correct ?

tglx


diff -urN 2.6.10-rc2-mm2.orig/mm/oom_kill.c 2.6.10-rc2-mm2/mm/oom_kill.c
--- 2.6.10-rc2-mm2.orig/mm/oom_kill.c 2004-11-19 14:52:16.000000000 +0100
+++ 2.6.10-rc2-mm2/mm/oom_kill.c 2004-11-19 17:12:40.000000000 +0100
@@ -45,8 +45,10 @@
static unsigned long badness(struct task_struct *p, unsigned long uptime)
{
unsigned long points, cpu_time, run_time, s;
+ struct list_head *tsk;

- if (!p->mm)
+ /* Ignore mm-less tasks and init */
+ if (!p->mm || p->pid == 1)
return 0;

if (p->flags & PF_MEMDIE)
@@ -57,6 +59,19 @@
points = p->mm->total_vm;

/*
+ * Processes which fork a lot of child processes are likely
+ * a good choice. We add the vmsize of the childs if they
+ * have an own mm. This prevents forking servers to flood the
+ * machine with an endless amount of childs
+ */
+ list_for_each(tsk, &p->children) {
+ struct task_struct *chld;
+ chld = list_entry(tsk, struct task_struct, sibling);
+ if (chld->mm != p->mm && chld->mm)
+ points += chld->mm->total_vm;
+ }
+
+ /*
* CPU time is in tens of seconds and run time is in thousands
* of seconds. There is no particular reason for this other than
* that it turned out to work very well in practice.
@@ -176,6 +191,27 @@
return mm;
}

+static struct mm_struct *oom_kill_process(task_t *p)
+{
+ struct mm_struct *mm;
+ struct task_struct *g, *q;
+
+ mm = oom_kill_task(p);
+ if (!mm)
+ return NULL;
+ /*
+ * kill all processes that share the ->mm (i.e. all threads),
+ * but are in a different thread group
+ */
+ do_each_thread(g, q)
+ if (q->mm == mm && q->tgid != p->tgid)
+ __oom_kill_task(q);
+
+ while_each_thread(g, q);
+ if (!p->mm)
+ printk(KERN_INFO "Fixed up OOM kill of mm-less task\n");
+ return mm;
+}

/**
* oom_kill - kill the "best" process when we run out of memory
@@ -188,7 +224,9 @@
void oom_kill(void)
{
struct mm_struct *mm;
- struct task_struct *g, *p, *q;
+ struct task_struct *c, *p;
+ struct list_head *tsk;
+ int mmcnt = 0;

read_lock(&tasklist_lock);
retry:
@@ -200,21 +238,25 @@
panic("Out of memory and no killable processes...\n");
}

- mm = oom_kill_task(p);
- if (!mm)
- goto retry;
/*
- * kill all processes that share the ->mm (i.e. all threads),
- * but are in a different thread group
+ * Kill the child processes first
*/
- do_each_thread(g, q)
- if (q->mm == mm && q->tgid != p->tgid)
- __oom_kill_task(q);
- while_each_thread(g, q);
- if (!p->mm)
- printk(KERN_INFO "Fixed up OOM kill of mm-less task\n");
+ list_for_each(tsk, &p->children) {
+ c = list_entry(tsk, struct task_struct, sibling);
+ if (c->mm == p->mm)
+ continue;
+ mm = oom_kill_process(c);
+ if (mm) {
+ mmcnt ++;
+ mmput(mm);
+ }
+ }
+ mm = oom_kill_process(p);
+ if (!mmcnt && !mm)
+ goto retry;
+ if (mm)
+ mmput(mm);
read_unlock(&tasklist_lock);
- mmput(mm);
return;
}

@@ -224,59 +266,23 @@
void out_of_memory(int gfp_mask)
{
/*
- * oom_lock protects out_of_memory()'s static variables.
- * It's a global lock; this is not performance-critical.
- */
- static DEFINE_SPINLOCK(oom_lock);
- static unsigned long first, last, count, lastkill;
- unsigned long now, since;
-
- spin_lock(&oom_lock);
- now = jiffies;
- since = now - last;
- last = now;
-
- /*
- * If it's been a long time since last failure,
- * we're not oom.
- */
- if (since > 5*HZ)
- goto reset;
-
- /*
- * If we haven't tried for at least one second,
- * we're not really oom.
- */
- since = now - first;
- if (since < HZ)
- goto out_unlock;
-
- /*
- * If we have gotten only a few failures,
- * we're not really oom.
- */
- if (++count < 10)
- goto out_unlock;
-
- /*
- * If we just killed a process, wait a while
- * to give that task a chance to exit. This
- * avoids killing multiple processes needlessly.
- */
- since = now - lastkill;
- if (since < HZ*5)
- goto out_unlock;
-
- /*
- * Ok, really out of memory. Kill something.
- */
- lastkill = now;
+ * inprogress protects out_of_memory()'s static variables
+ * and prevents reentrancy
+ */
+ static unsigned long inprogress;
+ static unsigned int freepages = 1000000;
+
+ if (test_and_set_bit(0, &inprogress))
+ return;
+
+ /* Check, if memory was freed since the last oom kill */
+ if (freepages < nr_free_pages())
+ goto out_unlock;

printk("oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x%x\n", gfp_mask);
show_free_areas();
-
- /* oom_kill() sleeps */
- spin_unlock(&oom_lock);
+ /* Store free pages * 2 for the check above */
+ freepages = (nr_free_pages() << 1);
oom_kill();
/*
* Make kswapd go out of the way, so "p" has a good chance of
@@ -284,17 +290,7 @@
* for more memory.
*/
yield();
- spin_lock(&oom_lock);
-
-reset:
- /*
- * We dropped the lock above, so check to be sure the variable
- * first only ever increases to prevent false OOM's.
- */
- if (time_after(now, first))
- first = now;
- count = 0;
-
+
out_unlock:
- spin_unlock(&oom_lock);
+ clear_bit(0, &inprogress);
}