[RFC] Per file OOM badness

[Michel Dänzer]

On 2018-04-04 11:36 AM, Lucas Stach wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 04.04.2018, 11:09 +0200 schrieb Michel Dänzer:
>> On 2018-03-26 04:36 PM, Lucas Stach wrote:
>>> Am Dienstag, den 30.01.2018, 11:28 +0100 schrieb Michal Hocko:
>>>> On Tue 30-01-18 10:29:10, Michel Dänzer wrote:
>>>>> On 2018-01-24 12:50 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
>>>>>> On Wed 24-01-18 12:23:10, Michel Dänzer wrote:
>>>>>>> On 2018-01-24 12:01 PM, Michal Hocko wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Wed 24-01-18 11:27:15, Michel Dänzer wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> [...]
>>>>>>>>> 2. If the OOM killer kills a process which is sharing BOs
>>>>>>>>> with another
>>>>>>>>> process, this should result in the other process dropping
>>>>>>>>> its references
>>>>>>>>> to the BOs as well, at which point the memory is released.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> OK. How exactly are those BOs mapped to the userspace?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I'm not sure what you're asking. Userspace mostly uses a GEM
>>>>>>> handle to
>>>>>>> refer to a BO. There can also be userspace CPU mappings of the
>>>>>>> BO's
>>>>>>> memory, but userspace doesn't need CPU mappings for all BOs and
>>>>>>> only
>>>>>>> creates them as needed.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> OK, I guess you have to bear with me some more. This whole stack
>>>>>> is a
>>>>>> complete uknonwn. I am mostly after finding a boundary where you
>>>>>> can
>>>>>> charge the allocated memory to the process so that the oom killer
>>>>>> can
>>>>>> consider it. Is there anything like that? Except for the proposed
>>>>>> file
>>>>>> handle hack?
>>>>>
>>>>> How about the other way around: what APIs can we use to charge /
>>>>> "uncharge" memory to a process? If we have those, we can experiment
>>>>> with
>>>>> different places to call them.
>>>>
>>>> add_mm_counter() and I would add a new counter e.g. MM_KERNEL_PAGES.
>>>
>>> So is anyone still working on this? This is hurting us bad enough that
>>> I don't want to keep this topic rotting for another year.
>>>
>>> If no one is currently working on this I would volunteer to give the
>>> simple "just account private, non-shared buffers in process RSS" a
>>> spin.
>>
>> Sounds good. FWIW, I think shared buffers can also be easily handled by
>> accounting them in each process which has a reference. But that's more
>> of a detail, shouldn't make a big difference overall either way.
> 
> Yes, both options to wither never account shared buffers or to always
> account them into every process having a reference should be pretty
> easy. Where it gets hard is when trying to account the buffer only in
> the last process holding a reference or something like this.

FWIW, I don't think that would make sense anyway. A shared buffer is
actually used by all processes which have a reference to it, so it
should be accounted the same in all of them.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer               |               http://www.amd.com
Libre software enthusiast             |             Mesa and X developer