tree 27eeb38c9ca690a19f05e06a2a46f094b20bfd52
parent bb2a0de92c891b8feeedc0178acb3ae009d899a8
author Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> 1311721703 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1311724182 -0700

memcg: make oom_lock 0 and 1 based rather than counter

Commit 867578cb ("memcg: fix oom kill behavior") introduced a oom_lock
counter which is incremented by mem_cgroup_oom_lock when we are about to
handle memcg OOM situation.  mem_cgroup_handle_oom falls back to a sleep
if oom_lock > 1 to prevent from multiple oom kills at the same time.
The counter is then decremented by mem_cgroup_oom_unlock called from the
same function.

This works correctly but it can lead to serious starvations when we have
many processes triggering OOM and many CPUs available for them (I have
tested with 16 CPUs).

Consider a process (call it A) which gets the oom_lock (the first one
that got to mem_cgroup_handle_oom and grabbed memcg_oom_mutex) and other
processes that are blocked on the mutex.  While A releases the mutex and
calls mem_cgroup_out_of_memory others will wake up (one after another)
and increase the counter and fall into sleep (memcg_oom_waitq).

Once A finishes mem_cgroup_out_of_memory it takes the mutex again and
decreases oom_lock and wakes other tasks (if releasing memory by
somebody else - e.g.  killed process - hasn't done it yet).

A testcase would look like:
  Assume malloc XXX is a program allocating XXX Megabytes of memory
  which touches all allocated pages in a tight loop
  # swapoff SWAP_DEVICE
  # cgcreate -g memory:A
  # cgset -r memory.oom_control=0   A
  # cgset -r memory.limit_in_bytes= 200M
  # for i in `seq 100`
  # do
  #     cgexec -g memory:A   malloc 10 &
  # done

The main problem here is that all processes still race for the mutex and
there is no guarantee that we will get counter back to 0 for those that
got back to mem_cgroup_handle_oom.  In the end the whole convoy
in/decreases the counter but we do not get to 1 that would enable
killing so nothing useful can be done.  The time is basically unbounded
because it highly depends on scheduling and ordering on mutex (I have
seen this taking hours...).

This patch replaces the counter by a simple {un}lock semantic.  As
mem_cgroup_oom_{un}lock works on the a subtree of a hierarchy we have to
make sure that nobody else races with us which is guaranteed by the
memcg_oom_mutex.

We have to be careful while locking subtrees because we can encounter a
subtree which is already locked: hierarchy:

          A
        /   \
       B     \
      /\      \
     C  D     E

B - C - D tree might be already locked.  While we want to enable locking
E subtree because OOM situations cannot influence each other we
definitely do not want to allow locking A.

Therefore we have to refuse lock if any subtree is already locked and
clear up the lock for all nodes that have been set up to the failure
point.

On the other hand we have to make sure that the rest of the world will
recognize that a group is under OOM even though it doesn't have a lock.
Therefore we have to introduce under_oom variable which is incremented
and decremented for the whole subtree when we enter resp.  leave
mem_cgroup_handle_oom.  under_oom, unlike oom_lock, doesn't need be
updated under memcg_oom_mutex because its users only check a single
group and they use atomic operations for that.

This can be checked easily by the following test case:

  # cgcreate -g memory:A
  # cgset -r memory.use_hierarchy=1 A
  # cgset -r memory.oom_control=1   A
  # cgset -r memory.limit_in_bytes= 100M
  # cgset -r memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes= 100M
  # cgcreate -g memory:A/B
  # cgset -r memory.oom_control=1 A/B
  # cgset -r memory.limit_in_bytes=20M
  # cgset -r memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes=20M
  # cgexec -g memory:A/B malloc 30  &    #->this will be blocked by OOM of group B
  # cgexec -g memory:A   malloc 80  &    #->this will be blocked by OOM of group A

While B gets oom_lock A will not get it.  Both of them go into sleep and
wait for an external action.  We can make the limit higher for A to
enforce waking it up

  # cgset -r memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes=300M A
  # cgset -r memory.limit_in_bytes=300M A

malloc in A has to wake up even though it doesn't have oom_lock.

Finally, the unlock path is very easy because we always unlock only the
subtree we have locked previously while we always decrement under_oom.

Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Balbir Singh <bsingharora@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>