[PATCH] oom: do not live lock on frozen tasks

From: Michal Hocko
Date: Fri Sep 16 2011 - 05:23:15 EST


Konstantin Khlebnikov has reported (https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/8/23/45)
that OOM can end up in a live lock if select_bad_process picks up a frozen
task.
Unfortunately we cannot mark such processes as unkillable to ignore them
because we could panic the system even though there is a chance that
somebody could thaw the process so we can make a forward process (e.g. a
process from another cpuset or with a different nodemask).

Let's thaw an OOM selected frozen process right after we've sent fatal
signal from oom_kill_task.
Thawing is safe if the frozen task doesn't access any suspended device
(e.g. by ioctl) on the way out to the userspace where we handle the
signal and die. Note, we are not interested in the kernel threads because
they are not oom killable.

Accessing suspended devices by a userspace processes shouldn't be an
issue because devices are suspended only after userspace is already
frozen and oom is disabled at that time.

run_guest (drivers/lguest/core.c) calls try_to_freeze with an user
context but it seems it is able to cope with signals because it
explicitly checks for pending signals so we should be safe.

Other than that userspace accesses the fridge only from the
signal handling routines so we are able to handle SIGKILL without any
negative side effects.

Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxx>
Reported-by: Konstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
mm/oom_kill.c | 6 ++++++
1 files changed, 6 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

diff --git a/mm/oom_kill.c b/mm/oom_kill.c
index 626303b..c419a7e 100644
--- a/mm/oom_kill.c
+++ b/mm/oom_kill.c
@@ -32,6 +32,7 @@
#include <linux/mempolicy.h>
#include <linux/security.h>
#include <linux/ptrace.h>
+#include <linux/freezer.h>

int sysctl_panic_on_oom;
int sysctl_oom_kill_allocating_task;
@@ -451,10 +452,15 @@ static int oom_kill_task(struct task_struct *p, struct mem_cgroup *mem)
task_pid_nr(q), q->comm);
task_unlock(q);
force_sig(SIGKILL, q);
+
+ if (frozen(q))
+ thaw_process(q);
}

set_tsk_thread_flag(p, TIF_MEMDIE);
force_sig(SIGKILL, p);
+ if (frozen(p))
+ thaw_process(p);

return 0;
}
--
1.7.5.4

--
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs
SUSE LINUX s.r.o.
Lihovarska 1060/12
190 00 Praha 9
Czech Republic
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/