linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm/madvise: add process_madvise MADV

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Date:   Wed, 9 Dec 2020 00:40:22 +0100
From:   Jann Horn <jannh@...gle.com>
To:     Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@...gle.com>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...nel.org>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>,
        David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
        Roman Gushchin <guro@...com>, Rik van Riel <riel@...riel.com>,
        Minchan Kim <minchan@...nel.org>,
        Christian Brauner <christian@...uner.io>,
        Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>,
        Tim Murray <timmurray@...gle.com>,
        Linux API <linux-api@...r.kernel.org>,
        Linux-MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        kernel list <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        kernel-team <kernel-team@...roid.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] mm/madvise: add process_madvise MADV_DONTNEER support

On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 6:50 AM Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@...gle.com> wrote:
> In modern systems it's not unusual to have a system component monitoring
> memory conditions of the system and tasked with keeping system memory
> pressure under control. One way to accomplish that is to kill
> non-essential processes to free up memory for more important ones.
> Examples of this are Facebook's OOM killer daemon called oomd and
> Android's low memory killer daemon called lmkd.
> For such system component it's important to be able to free memory
> quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately the time process takes to free
> up its memory after receiving a SIGKILL might vary based on the state
> of the process (uninterruptible sleep), size and OPP level of the core
> the process is running.
> In such situation it is desirable to be able to free up the memory of the
> process being killed in a more controlled way.
> Enable MADV_DONTNEED to be used with process_madvise when applied to a
> dying process to reclaim its memory. This would allow userspace system
> components like oomd and lmkd to free memory of the target process in
> a more predictable way.
>
> Signed-off-by: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@...gle.com>
[...]
> @@ -1239,6 +1256,23 @@ SYSCALL_DEFINE5(process_madvise, int, pidfd, const struct iovec __user *, vec,
>                 goto release_task;
>         }
>
> +       if (madvise_destructive(behavior)) {
> +               /* Allow destructive madvise only on a dying processes */
> +               if (!signal_group_exit(task->signal)) {
> +                       ret = -EINVAL;
> +                       goto release_mm;
> +               }

Technically Linux allows processes to share mm_struct without being in
the same thread group, so I'm not sure whether this check is good
enough? AFAICS the normal OOM killer deals with this case by letting
__oom_kill_process() always kill all tasks that share the mm_struct.