Re: [PATCH] mm: memcontrol: fix occasional OOMs due to proportional memory.low reclaim

[Michal Hocko]

On Tue 17-08-21 14:05:06, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> We've noticed occasional OOM killing when memory.low settings are in
> effect for cgroups. This is unexpected and undesirable as memory.low
> is supposed to express non-OOMing memory priorities between cgroups.
> 
> The reason for this is proportional memory.low reclaim. When cgroups
> are below their memory.low threshold, reclaim passes them over in the
> first round, and then retries if it couldn't find pages anywhere else.
> But when cgroups are slighly above their memory.low setting, page scan
> force is scaled down and diminished in proportion to the overage, to
> the point where it can cause reclaim to fail as well - only in that
> case we currently don't retry, and instead trigger OOM.
> 
> To fix this, hook proportional reclaim into the same retry logic we
> have in place for when cgroups are skipped entirely. This way if
> reclaim fails and some cgroups were scanned with dimished pressure,
> we'll try another full-force cycle before giving up and OOMing.
> 
> Reported-by: Leon Yang <lnyng@xxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>

Although I have to say that the code is quite tricky and it deserves
more comments. See below.

[...]
> @@ -2576,6 +2578,15 @@ static void get_scan_count(struct lruvec *lruvec, struct scan_control *sc,
>  			 * hard protection.
>  			 */
>  			unsigned long cgroup_size = mem_cgroup_size(memcg);
> +			unsigned long protection;
> +
> +			/* memory.low scaling, make sure we retry before OOM */
> +			if (!sc->memcg_low_reclaim && low > min) {
> +				protection = low;
> +				sc->memcg_low_skipped = 1;
> +			} else {
> +				protection = min;
> +			}

Just by looking at this in isolation one could be really curious how
does this not break the low memory protection altogether. The logic is
spread over 3 different places.

Would something like the following be more understandable?

			/*
			 * Low limit protected memcgs are already excluded at
			 * a higher level (shrink_node_memcgs) but scaling
			 * down the reclaim target can result in hard to
			 * reclaim and premature OOM. We do not have a full
			 * picture here so we cannot really judge this
			 * sutuation here but pro-actively flag this scenario
			 * and let do_try_to_free_pages to retry if
			 * there is no progress.
			 */
>  
>  			/* Avoid TOCTOU with earlier protection check */
>  			cgroup_size = max(cgroup_size, protection);
> -- 
> 2.32.0

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs