Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] mm: Select victim memcg using BPF_OOM_POLICY

[Michal Hocko]

On Thu 27-07-23 21:30:01, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 27, 2023 at 10:15:16AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Thu 27-07-23 15:36:27, Chuyi Zhou wrote:
> > > This patchset tries to add a new bpf prog type and use it to select
> > > a victim memcg when global OOM is invoked. The mainly motivation is
> > > the need to customizable OOM victim selection functionality so that
> > > we can protect more important app from OOM killer.
> > 
> > This is rather modest to give an idea how the whole thing is supposed to
> > work. I have looked through patches very quickly but there is no overall
> > design described anywhere either.
> > 
> > Please could you give us a high level design description and reasoning
> > why certain decisions have been made? e.g. why is this limited to the
> > global oom sitation, why is the BPF program forced to operate on memcgs
> > as entities etc...
> > Also it would be very helpful to call out limitations of the BPF
> > program, if there are any.
> 
> One thing I realized recently: we don't have to make a victim selection
> during the OOM, we [almost always] can do it in advance.
> 
> Kernel OOM's must guarantee the forward progress under heavy memory pressure
> and it creates a lot of limitations on what can and what can't be done in
> these circumstances.
> 
> But in practice most policies except maybe those which aim to catch very fast
> memory spikes rely on things which are fairly static: a logical importance of
> several workloads in comparison to some other workloads, "age", memory footprint
> etc.
> 
> So I wonder if the right path is to create a kernel interface which allows
> to define a OOM victim (maybe several victims, also depending on if it's
> a global or a memcg oom) and update it periodically from an userspace.

We already have that interface. Just echo OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MAX to any tasks
that are to be killed with a priority...
Not a great interface but still something available.

> In fact, the second part is already implemented by tools like oomd, systemd-oomd etc.
> Someone might say that the first part is also implemented by the oom_score
> interface, but I don't think it's an example of a convenient interface.
> It's also not a memcg-level interface.

What do you mean by not memcg-level interface? What kind of interface
would you propose instead?

> Just some thoughts.
> 
> Thanks!

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs