[PATCH 03/13] mm: shmem: provide oom badness for shmem files

[Christian König]

Am 13.06.22 um 14:11 schrieb Michal Hocko:
> [SNIP]
>>>> Alternative I could try to track the "owner" of a buffer (e.g. a shmem
>>>> file), but then it can happen that one processes creates the object and
>>>> another one is writing to it and actually allocating the memory.
>>> If you can enforce that the owner is really responsible for the
>>> allocation then all should be fine. That would require MAP_POPULATE like
>>> semantic and I suspect this is not really feasible with the existing
>>> userspace. It would be certainly hard to enforce for bad players.
>> I've tried this today and the result was: "BUG: Bad rss-counter state
>> mm:000000008751d9ff type:MM_FILEPAGES val:-571286".
>>
>> The problem is once more that files are not informed when the process
>> clones. So what happened is that somebody called fork() with an mm_struct
>> I've accounted my pages to. The result is just that we messed up the
>> rss_stats and  the the "BUG..." above.
>>
>> The key difference between normal allocated pages and the resources here is
>> just that we are not bound to an mm_struct in any way.
> It is not really clear to me what exactly you have tried.

I've tried to track the "owner" of a driver connection by keeping a 
reference to the mm_struct who created this connection inside our file 
private and then use add_mm_counter() to account all the allocations of 
the driver to this mm_struct.

This works to the extend that now the right process is killed in an OOM 
situation. The problem with this approach is that the driver is not 
informed about operations like fork() or clone(), so what happens is 
that after a fork()/clone() we have an unbalanced rss-counter.

Let me maybe get back to the initial question: We have resources which 
are not related to the virtual address space of a process, how should we 
tell the OOM killer about them?

Thanks for all the input so far,
Christian.