linux-kernel - Re: OOM notifications

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Message-Id: <20071026141112.18af0fa6.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Date:	Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:11:12 -0700
From:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Martin Bligh <mbligh@...igh.org>
Cc:	marcelo@...ck.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	drepper@...hat.com, riel@...hat.com, linux-mm@...ck.org
Subject: Re: OOM notifications

On Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:05:47 -0700
Martin Bligh <mbligh@...igh.org> wrote:

> > Martin was talking about some mad scheme wherin you'd create a bunch of
> > pseudo files (say, /proc/foo/0, /proc/foo/1, ..., /proc/foo/9) and each one
> > would become "ready" when the MM scanning priority reaches 10%, 20%, ... 
> > 100%.
> > 
> > Obviously there would need to be a lot of abstraction to unhook a permanent
> > userspace feature from a transient kernel implementation, but the basic
> > idea is that a process which wants to know when the VM is getting into the
> > orange zone would select() on the file "7" and a process which wants to
> > know when the VM is getting into the red zone would select on file "9".
> > 
> > It get more complicated with NUMA memory nodes and cgroup memory
> > controllers.
> 
> We ended up not doing that, but making a scanner that saw what
> percentage of the LRU was touched in the last n seconds, and
> printing that to userspace to deal with.
> 
> Turns out priority is a horrible metric to use for this - it
> stays at default for ages, then falls off a cliff far too
> quickly to react to.

Sure, but in terms of high-level userspace interface, being able to
select() on a group of priority buckets (spread across different nodes,
zones and cgroups) seems a lot more flexible than any signal-based
approach we could come up with.
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