tree 33c69908705c88b86f14d9e835b6dee6a9c3a31b
parent 9827b781f20828e5ceb911b879f268f78fe90815
author Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com> 1140488872 -0800
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@g5.osdl.org> 1140494409 -0800

[PATCH] Terminate process that fails on a constrained allocation

Some allocations are restricted to a limited set of nodes (due to memory
policies or cpuset constraints).  If the page allocator is not able to find
enough memory then that does not mean that overall system memory is low.

In particular going postal and more or less randomly shooting at processes
is not likely going to help the situation but may just lead to suicide (the
whole system coming down).

It is better to signal to the process that no memory exists given the
constraints that the process (or the configuration of the process) has
placed on the allocation behavior.  The process may be killed but then the
sysadmin or developer can investigate the situation.  The solution is
similar to what we do when running out of hugepages.

This patch adds a check before we kill processes.  At that point
performance considerations do not matter much so we just scan the zonelist
and reconstruct a list of nodes.  If the list of nodes does not contain all
online nodes then this is a constrained allocation and we should kill the
current process.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@muc.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>