mm, oom: do not rely on TIF_MEMDIE for memory reserves access

For ages we have been relying on TIF_MEMDIE thread flag to mark OOM
victims and then, among other things, to give these threads full access
to memory reserves.  There are few shortcomings of this implementation,
though.

First of all and the most serious one is that the full access to memory
reserves is quite dangerous because we leave no safety room for the
system to operate and potentially do last emergency steps to move on.

Secondly this flag is per task_struct while the OOM killer operates on
mm_struct granularity so all processes sharing the given mm are killed.
Giving the full access to all these task_structs could lead to a quick
memory reserves depletion.  We have tried to reduce this risk by giving
TIF_MEMDIE only to the main thread and the currently allocating task but
that doesn't really solve this problem while it surely opens up a room
for corner cases - e.g.  GFP_NO{FS,IO} requests might loop inside the
allocator without access to memory reserves because a particular thread
was not the group leader.

Now that we have the oom reaper and that all oom victims are reapable
after 1b51e65eab64 ("oom, oom_reaper: allow to reap mm shared by the
kthreads") we can be more conservative and grant only partial access to
memory reserves because there are reasonable chances of the parallel
memory freeing.  We still want some access to reserves because we do not
want other consumers to eat up the victim's freed memory.  oom victims
will still contend with __GFP_HIGH users but those shouldn't be so
aggressive to starve oom victims completely.

Introduce ALLOC_OOM flag and give all tsk_is_oom_victim tasks access to
the half of the reserves.  This makes the access to reserves independent
on which task has passed through mark_oom_victim.  Also drop any usage
of TIF_MEMDIE from the page allocator proper and replace it by
tsk_is_oom_victim as well which will make page_alloc.c completely
TIF_MEMDIE free finally.

CONFIG_MMU=n doesn't have oom reaper so let's stick to the original
ALLOC_NO_WATERMARKS approach.

There is a demand to make the oom killer memcg aware which will imply
many tasks killed at once.  This change will allow such a usecase
without worrying about complete memory reserves depletion.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170810075019.28998-2-mhocko@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/mm/oom_kill.c b/mm/oom_kill.c
index 9e8b4f030c1c..c9f3569a76c7 100644
--- a/mm/oom_kill.c
+++ b/mm/oom_kill.c
@@ -824,7 +824,8 @@ static void oom_kill_process(struct oom_control *oc, const char *message)
 
 	/*
 	 * If the task is already exiting, don't alarm the sysadmin or kill
-	 * its children or threads, just set TIF_MEMDIE so it can die quickly
+	 * its children or threads, just give it access to memory reserves
+	 * so it can die quickly
 	 */
 	task_lock(p);
 	if (task_will_free_mem(p)) {
@@ -889,9 +890,9 @@ static void oom_kill_process(struct oom_control *oc, const char *message)
 	count_memcg_event_mm(mm, OOM_KILL);
 
 	/*
-	 * We should send SIGKILL before setting TIF_MEMDIE in order to prevent
-	 * the OOM victim from depleting the memory reserves from the user
-	 * space under its control.
+	 * We should send SIGKILL before granting access to memory reserves
+	 * in order to prevent the OOM victim from depleting the memory
+	 * reserves from the user space under its control.
 	 */
 	do_send_sig_info(SIGKILL, SEND_SIG_FORCED, victim, true);
 	mark_oom_victim(victim);