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

[Michal Hocko]

On Wed 02-03-16 11:55:07, Joonsoo Kim wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 01, 2016 at 07:14:08PM +0100, Vlastimil Babka wrote:
[...]
> > Yes, compaction is historically quite careful to avoid making low
> > memory conditions worse, and to prevent work if it doesn't look like
> > it can ultimately succeed the allocation (so having not enough base
> > pages means that compacting them is considered pointless). This
> > aspect of preventing non-zero-order OOMs is somewhat unexpected :)
> 
> It's better not to assume that compaction would succeed all the times.
> Compaction has some limitations so it sometimes fails.
> For example, in lowmem situation, it only scans small parts of memory
> and if that part is fragmented by non-movable page, compaction would fail.
> And, compaction would defer requests 64 times at maximum if successive
> compaction failure happens before.
> 
> Depending on compaction heavily is right direction to go but I think
> that it's not ready for now. More reclaim would relieve problem.

I really fail to see why. The reclaimable memory can be migrated as
well, no? Relying on the order-0 reclaim makes only sense to get over
wmarks.

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs