[RFC] [PATCH] Cgroup based OOM killer controller

David Rientjes rientjes at google.com
Thu Jan 22 01:39:28 PST 2009


On Thu, 22 Jan 2009, Nikanth Karthikesan wrote:

> > You can't specify different behavior for an oom cgroup depending on what
> > type of oom it is, which is the problem with this proposal.
> >
> 
> No. This does not disable any such special selection criteria which is used 
> without this controller.
> 

I didn't say it disabled it; the cpuset preference is actually implemented 
in the badness() score and not specifically excluded in 
select_bad_process().  That's because it's quite possible that a task has 
allocated memory in a cpuset and then either moved to a separate cpuset or 
had it's mems_allowed changed.

Please try it and you'll see.  Create two cpusets, cpuset A and cpuset B.  
Elevate cpuset A's oom.victim value and then trigger an oom in cpuset B.  
Your patch will cause a task from cpuset A to be killed for a cpuset B 
triggered oom which, more often than not, will not lead to future memory 
freeing.

It's quite possible that cpuset A would be preferred to be killed in a 
global unconstrained oom condition, however.  That's the only reason why 
one would elevate its oom.victim score to begin with.  But it doesn't work 
for cpuset-constrained ooms.

It's not going to help if it I explain it further and you don't try it out 
on your own.  Thanks.


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