Re: [PATCH 0/3] OOM detection rework v4

[Johannes Weiner]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 02:15:09PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Wed 16-12-15 15:58:44, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > It's hard to say how long declaration of oom should take.  Correctness
> > comes first.  But what is "correct"?  oom isn't a binary condition -
> > there's a chance that if we keep churning away for another 5 minutes
> > we'll be able to satisfy this allocation (but probably not the next
> > one).  There are tradeoffs between promptness-of-declaring-oom and
> > exhaustiveness-in-avoiding-it.
> 
> Yes, this is really hard to tell. What I wanted to achieve here is a
> determinism - the same load should give comparable results. It seems
> that there is an improvement in this regards. The time to settle is 
> much more consistent than with the original implementation.

+1

Before that we couldn't even really make a meaningful statement about
how long we are going to try - "as long as reclaim thinks it can maybe
do some more, depending on heuristics". I think the best thing we can
strive for with OOM is to make the rules simple and predictable.
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