• David Rientjes's avatar
    oom: prevent unnecessary oom kills or kernel panics · 3a5dda7a
    David Rientjes authored
    This patch prevents unnecessary oom kills or kernel panics by reverting
    two commits:
    
    	495789a5 (oom: make oom_score to per-process value)
    	cef1d352 (oom: multi threaded process coredump don't make deadlock)
    
    First, 495789a5 (oom: make oom_score to per-process value) ignores the
    fact that all threads in a thread group do not necessarily exit at the
    same time.
    
    It is imperative that select_bad_process() detect threads that are in the
    exit path, specifically those with PF_EXITING set, to prevent needlessly
    killing additional tasks.  If a process is oom killed and the thread group
    leader exits, select_bad_process() cannot detect the other threads that
    are PF_EXITING by iterating over only processes.  Thus, it currently
    chooses another task unnecessarily for oom kill or panics the machine when
    nothing else is eligible.
    
    By iterating over threads instead, it is possible to detect threads that
    are exiting and nominate them for oom kill so they get access to memory
    reserves.
    
    Second, cef1d352 (oom: multi threaded process coredump don't make
    deadlock) erroneously avoids making the oom killer a no-op when an
    eligible thread other than current isfound to be exiting.  We want to
    detect this situation so that we may allow that exiting thread time to
    exit and free its memory; if it is able to exit on its own, that should
    free memory so current is no loner oom.  If it is not able to exit on its
    own, the oom killer will nominate it for oom kill which, in this case,
    only means it will get access to memory reserves.
    
    Without this change, it is easy for the oom killer to unnecessarily target
    tasks when all threads of a victim don't exit before the thread group
    leader or, in the worst case, panic the machine.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
    Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
    Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
    Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
    Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
    Cc: Andrey Vagin <avagin@openvz.org>
    Cc: <stable@kernel.org>		[2.6.38.x]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    3a5dda7a
oom_kill.c 21.2 KB