linux-kernel - Re: Let's talk about the elephant in the room - the Linux kernel's inability to gracefully handle low memory pressure

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Message-ID: <874l2u3yre.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de>
Date:   Tue, 06 Aug 2019 21:00:21 +0200
From:   Florian Weimer <fw@...eb.enyo.de>
To:     "Artem S. Tashkinov" <aros@....com>
Cc:     linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm <linux-mm@...ck.org>
Subject: Re: Let's talk about the elephant in the room - the Linux kernel's inability to gracefully handle low memory pressure

* Artem S. Tashkinov:

> There's this bug which has been bugging many people for many years
> already and which is reproducible in less than a few minutes under the
> latest and greatest kernel, 5.2.6. All the kernel parameters are set to
> defaults.
>
> Steps to reproduce:
>
> 1) Boot with mem=4G
> 2) Disable swap to make everything faster (sudo swapoff -a)
> 3) Launch a web browser, e.g. Chrome/Chromium or/and Firefox
> 4) Start opening tabs in either of them and watch your free RAM decrease

Do you see this with Intel graphics?  I think these drivers still use
the GEM shrinker, which effectively bypasses most kernel memory
management heuristics.