Date:   Mon, 6 Aug 2018 16:58:01 +0200
From:   Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@...gle.com>
To:     Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>
Cc:     syzbot <syzbot+bab151e82a4e973fa325@...kaller.appspotmail.com>,
        cgroups@...r.kernel.org, Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Linux-MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        syzkaller-bugs <syzkaller-bugs@...glegroups.com>,
        Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@...il.com>,
        Dmitry Torokhov <dtor@...gle.com>
Subject: Re: WARNING in try_charge

On Mon, Aug 6, 2018 at 4:21 PM, Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org> wrote:
> On Mon 06-08-18 13:57:38, Dmitry Vyukov wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 6, 2018 at 1:02 PM, Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org> wrote:
> [...]
>> >> A much
>> >> friendlier for user way to say this would be print a message at the
>> >> point of misconfiguration saying what exactly is wrong, e.g. "pid $PID
>> >> misconfigures cgroup /cgroup/path with mem.limit=0" without a stack
>> >> trace (does not give any useful info for user). And return EINVAL if
>> >> it can't fly at all? And then leave the "or a kernel bug" part for the
>> >> WARNING each occurrence of which we do want to be reported to kernel
>> >> developers.
>> >
>> > But this is not applicable here. Your misconfiguration is quite obvious
>> > because you simply set the hard limit to 0. This is not the only
>> > situation when this can happen. There is no clear point to tell, you are
>> > doing this wrong. If it was we would do it at that point obviously.
>>
>> But, isn't there a point were hard limit is set to 0? I would expect
>> there is a something like cgroup file write handler with a value of 0
>> or something.
>
> Yeah, but this is only one instance of the problem. Other is that the
> memcg is not reclaimable for any other reasons. And we do not know what
> those might be
>
>>
>> > If you have a strong reason to believe that this is an abuse of WARN I
>> > am all happy to change that. But I haven't heard any yet, to be honest.
>>
>> WARN must not be used for anything that is not kernel bugs. If this is
>> not kernel bug, WARN must not be used here.
>
> This is rather strong wording without any backing arguments. I strongly
> doubt 90% of existing WARN* match this expectation. WARN* has
> traditionally been a way to tell that something suspicious is going on.
> Those situation are mostly likely not fatal but it is good to know they
> are happening.
>
> Sure there is that panic_on_warn thingy which you seem to be using and I
> suspect it is a reason why you are so careful about warnings in general
> but my experience tells me that this configuration is barely usable
> except for testing (which is your case).
>
> But as I've said, I do not insist on WARN here. All I care about is to
> warn user that something might go south and this may be either due to
> misconfiguration or a subtly wrong memcg reclaim/OOM handler behavior.

I am a bit lost. Can limit=0 legally lead to the warnings? Or there is
also a kernel bug on top of that and it's actually a kernel bug that
provokes the warning?
If it's a kernel bug, then I propose to stop arguing about
configuration and concentrate on the bug.
If it's just the misconfiguration that triggers the warning,  then can
we separate the 2 causes of the warning (user misconfiguration and
kernel bugs)? Say, return EINVAL when mem limit is set to 0 (and print
a line to console if necessary)? Or if the limit=0 is somehow not
possible/desirable to detect right away, check limit=0 at the point of
the warning and don't want?

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