08 Sep, 2005

2 commits

  • Now the real motivation for this cpuset mem_exclusive patch series seems
    trivial.

    This patch keeps a task in or under one mem_exclusive cpuset from provoking an
    oom kill of a task under a non-overlapping mem_exclusive cpuset. Since only
    interrupt and GFP_ATOMIC allocations are allowed to escape mem_exclusive
    containment, there is little to gain from oom killing a task under a
    non-overlapping mem_exclusive cpuset, as almost all kernel and user memory
    allocation must come from disjoint memory nodes.

    This patch enables configuring a system so that a runaway job under one
    mem_exclusive cpuset cannot cause the killing of a job in another such cpuset
    that might be using very high compute and memory resources for a prolonged
    time.

    Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Paul Jackson
     
  • This patch series extends the use of the cpuset attribute 'mem_exclusive'
    to support cpuset configurations that:
    1) allow GFP_KERNEL allocations to come from a potentially larger
    set of memory nodes than GFP_USER allocations, and
    2) can constrain the oom killer to tasks running in cpusets in
    a specified subtree of the cpuset hierarchy.

    Here's an example usage scenario. For a few hours or more, a large NUMA
    system at a University is to be divided in two halves, with a bunch of student
    jobs running in half the system under some form of batch manager, and with a
    big research project running in the other half. Each of the student jobs is
    placed in a small cpuset, but should share the classic Unix time share
    facilities, such as buffered pages of files in /bin and /usr/lib. The big
    research project wants no interference whatsoever from the student jobs, and
    has highly tuned, unusual memory and i/o patterns that intend to make full use
    of all the main memory on the nodes available to it.

    In this example, we have two big sibling cpusets, one of which is further
    divided into a more dynamic set of child cpusets.

    We want kernel memory allocations constrained by the two big cpusets, and user
    allocations constrained by the smaller child cpusets where present. And we
    require that the oom killer not operate across the two halves of this system,
    or else the first time a student job runs amuck, the big research project will
    likely be first inline to get shot.

    Tweaking /proc//oom_adj is not ideal -- if the big research project
    really does run amuck allocating memory, it should be shot, not some other
    task outside the research projects mem_exclusive cpuset.

    I propose to extend the use of the 'mem_exclusive' flag of cpusets to manage
    such scenarios. Let memory allocations for user space (GFP_USER) be
    constrained by a tasks current cpuset, but memory allocations for kernel space
    (GFP_KERNEL) by constrained by the nearest mem_exclusive ancestor of the
    current cpuset, even though kernel space allocations will still _prefer_ to
    remain within the current tasks cpuset, if memory is easily available.

    Let the oom killer be constrained to consider only tasks that are in
    overlapping mem_exclusive cpusets (it won't help much to kill a task that
    normally cannot allocate memory on any of the same nodes as the ones on which
    the current task can allocate.)

    The current constraints imposed on setting mem_exclusive are unchanged. A
    cpuset may only be mem_exclusive if its parent is also mem_exclusive, and a
    mem_exclusive cpuset may not overlap any of its siblings memory nodes.

    This patch was presented on linux-mm in early July 2005, though did not
    generate much feedback at that time. It has been built for a variety of
    arch's using cross tools, and built, booted and tested for function on SN2
    (ia64).

    There are 4 patches in this set:
    1) Some minor cleanup, and some improvements to the code layout
    of one routine to make subsequent patches cleaner.
    2) Add another GFP flag - __GFP_HARDWALL. It marks memory
    requests for USER space, which are tightly confined by the
    current tasks cpuset.
    3) Now memory requests (such as KERNEL) that not marked HARDWALL can
    if short on memory, look in the potentially larger pool of memory
    defined by the nearest mem_exclusive ancestor cpuset of the current
    tasks cpuset.
    4) Finally, modify the oom killer to skip any task whose mem_exclusive
    cpuset doesn't overlap ours.

    Patch (1), the one time I looked on an SN2 (ia64) build, actually saved 32
    bytes of kernel text space. Patch (2) has no affect on the size of kernel
    text space (it just adds a preprocessor flag). Patches (3) and (4) added
    about 600 bytes each of kernel text space, mostly in kernel/cpuset.c, which
    matters only if CONFIG_CPUSET is enabled.

    This patch:

    This patch applies a few comment and code cleanups to mm/oom_kill.c prior to
    applying a few small patches to improve cpuset management of memory placement.

    The comment changed in oom_kill.c was seriously misleading. The code layout
    change in select_bad_process() makes room for adding another condition on
    which a process can be spared the oom killer (see the subsequent
    cpuset_nodes_overlap patch for this addition).

    Also a couple typos and spellos that bugged me, while I was here.

    This patch should have no material affect.

    Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Paul Jackson
     

08 Jul, 2005

2 commits

  • We now print statistics when invoking the OOM killer, however this
    information is not rate limited and you can get into situations where the
    console is continually spammed.

    For example, when a task is exiting the OOM killer will simply return
    (waiting for that task to exit and clear up memory). If the VM continually
    calls back into the OOM killer we get thousands of copies of show_mem() on
    the console.

    Use printk_ratelimit() to quieten it.

    Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Anton Blanchard
     
  • Dump the current allocation order when OOM killing.

    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Marcelo Tosatti
     

22 Jun, 2005

1 commit

  • This patch provides more debug info when the system is OOM. It displays
    memory stats (basically sysrq-m info) from __alloc_pages() when page
    allocation fails and during OOM kill.

    Thanks to Dave Jones for coming up with the idea.

    Signed-off-by: Janet Morgan
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Janet Morgan
     

17 Apr, 2005

2 commits

  • iscsi/lvm2/multipath needs guaranteed protection from the oom-killer, so
    make the magical value of -17 in /proc//oom_adj defeat the oom-killer
    altogether.

    (akpm: we still need to document oom_adj and friends in
    Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt!)

    Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli
    Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Andrea Arcangeli
     
  • Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
    even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
    archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
    3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
    git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
    infrastructure for it.

    Let it rip!

    Linus Torvalds