linux-kernel - Re: [question] how to figure out OOM reason? should dump slab/vmalloc info when OOM?

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Message-ID: <52F9A1D8.7040301@huawei.com>
Date:	Tue, 11 Feb 2014 12:06:48 +0800
From:	Jianguo Wu <wujianguo@...wei.com>
To:	David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>
CC:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
	Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>, <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
	<linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [question] how to figure out OOM reason? should dump slab/vmalloc
 info when OOM?

On 2014/1/22 4:41, David Rientjes wrote:

> On Tue, 21 Jan 2014, Jianguo Wu wrote:
> 
>>> The problem is that slabinfo becomes excessively verbose and dumping it 
>>> all to the kernel log often times causes important messages to be lost.  
>>> This is why we control things like the tasklist dump with a VM sysctl.  It 
>>> would be possible to dump, say, the top ten slab caches with the highest 
>>> memory usage, but it will only be helpful for slab leaks.  Typically there 
>>> are better debugging tools available than analyzing the kernel log; if you 
>>> see unusually high slab memory in the meminfo dump, you can enable it.
>>>
>>
>> But, when OOM has happened, we can only use kernel log, slab/vmalloc info from proc
>> is stale. Maybe we can dump slab/vmalloc with a VM sysctl, and only top 10/20 entrys?
>>
> 
> You could, but it's a tradeoff between how much to dump to a general 
> resource such as the kernel log and how many sysctls we add that control 
> every possible thing.  Slab leaks would definitely be a minority of oom 
> conditions and you should normally be able to reproduce them by running 
> the same workload; just use slabtop(1) or manually inspect /proc/slabinfo 
> while such a workload is running for indicators.  I don't think we want to 
> add the information by default, though, nor do we want to add sysctls to 
> control the behavior (you'd still need to reproduce the issue after 
> enabling it).
> 
> We are currently discussing userspace oom handlers, though, that would 
> allow you to run a process that would be notified and allowed to allocate 
> a small amount of memory on oom conditions.  It would then be trivial to 
> dump any information you feel pertinent in userspace prior to killing 
> something.  I like to inspect heap profiles for memory hogs while 
> debugging our malloc() issues, for example, and you could look more 
> closely at kernel memory.
> 
> I'll cc you on future discussions of that feature.
> 

Hi David,

Thanks for your kindly explanation, do you have any specific plans on this?

Thanks,
Jianguo Wu.

> 



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