linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v2] mm: memcontrol: protect the memory in cgroup from being oom killed

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Date:   Fri, 9 Dec 2022 09:25:37 +0100
From:   Michal Hocko <mhocko@...e.com>
To:     程垲涛 Chengkaitao Cheng 
        <chengkaitao@...iglobal.com>
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Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] mm: memcontrol: protect the memory in cgroup from
 being oom killed

On Fri 09-12-22 05:07:15, 程垲涛 Chengkaitao Cheng wrote:
> At 2022-12-08 22:23:56, "Michal Hocko" <mhocko@...e.com> wrote:
[...]
> >oom killer is a memory reclaim of the last resort. So yes, there is some
> >difference but fundamentally it is about releasing some memory. And long
> >term we have learned that the more clever it tries to be the more likely
> >corner cases can happen. It is simply impossible to know the best
> >candidate so this is a just a best effort. We try to aim for
> >predictability at least.
> 
> Is the current oom_score strategy predictable? I don't think so. The score_adj 
> has broken the predictability of oom_score (it is no longer simply killing the 
> process that uses the most mems).

oom_score as reported to the userspace already considers oom_score_adj
which means that you can compare processes and get a reasonable guess
what would be the current oom_victim. There is a certain fuzz level
because this is not atomic and also there is no clear candidate when
multiple processes have equal score. So yes, it is not 100% predictable.
memory.reclaim as you propose doesn't change that though.

Is oom_score_adj a good interface? No, not really. If I could go back in
time I would nack it but here we are. We have an interface that
promises quite much but essentially it only allows two usecases
(OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MIN, OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MAX) reliably. Everything in between
is clumsy at best because a real user space oom policy would require to
re-evaluate the whole oom domain (be it global or memcg oom) as the
memory consumption evolves over time. I am really worried that your
memory.oom.protection directs a very similar trajectory because
protection really needs to consider other memcgs to balance properly.

[...]

> > But I am really open
> >to be convinced otherwise and this is in fact what I have been asking
> >for since the beginning. I would love to see some examples on the
> >reasonable configuration for a practical usecase.
> 
> Here is a simple example. In a docker container, users can divide all processes 
> into two categories (important and normal), and put them in different cgroups. 
> One cgroup's oom.protect is set to "max", the other is set to "0". In this way, 
> important processes in the container can be protected.

That is effectivelly oom_score_adj = OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MIN - 1 to all
processes in the important group. I would argue you can achieve a very
similar result by the process launcher to set the oom_score_adj and
inherit it to all processes in that important container. You do not need
any memcg tunable for that. I am really much more interested in examples
when the protection is to be fine tuned.
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs