[PATCH] mm, oom: prevent pre-mature OOM killer invocation for high order request

[Michal Hocko]

There have been several reports about pre-mature OOM killer invocation
in 4.7 kernel when order-2 allocation request (for the kernel stack)
invoked OOM killer even during basic workloads (light IO or even kernel
compile on some filesystems). In all reported cases the memory is
fragmented and there are no order-2+ pages available. There is usually
a large amount of slab memory (usually dentries/inodes) and further
debugging has shown that there are way too many unmovable blocks which
are skipped during the compaction. Multiple reporters have confirmed that
the current linux-next which includes [1] and [2] helped and OOMs are
not reproducible anymore. A simpler fix for the stable is to simply
ignore the compaction feedback and retry as long as there is a reclaim
progress for high order requests which we used to do before. We already
do that for CONFING_COMPACTION=n so let's reuse the same code when
compaction is enabled as well.

[1] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160810091226.6709-1-vbabka@xxxxxxx
[2] http://lkml.kernel.org/r/f7a9ea9d-bb88-bfd6-e340-3a933559305a@xxxxxxx

Fixes: 0a0337e0d1d1 ("mm, oom: rework oom detection")
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
---
 mm/page_alloc.c | 50 ++------------------------------------------------
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 48 deletions(-)

diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index 8b3e1341b754..6e354199151b 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -3254,53 +3254,6 @@ __alloc_pages_direct_compact(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order,
 	return NULL;
 }
 
-static inline bool
-should_compact_retry(struct alloc_context *ac, int order, int alloc_flags,
-		     enum compact_result compact_result, enum migrate_mode *migrate_mode,
-		     int compaction_retries)
-{
-	int max_retries = MAX_COMPACT_RETRIES;
-
-	if (!order)
-		return false;
-
-	/*
-	 * compaction considers all the zone as desperately out of memory
-	 * so it doesn't really make much sense to retry except when the
-	 * failure could be caused by weak migration mode.
-	 */
-	if (compaction_failed(compact_result)) {
-		if (*migrate_mode == MIGRATE_ASYNC) {
-			*migrate_mode = MIGRATE_SYNC_LIGHT;
-			return true;
-		}
-		return false;
-	}
-
-	/*
-	 * make sure the compaction wasn't deferred or didn't bail out early
-	 * due to locks contention before we declare that we should give up.
-	 * But do not retry if the given zonelist is not suitable for
-	 * compaction.
-	 */
-	if (compaction_withdrawn(compact_result))
-		return compaction_zonelist_suitable(ac, order, alloc_flags);
-
-	/*
-	 * !costly requests are much more important than __GFP_REPEAT
-	 * costly ones because they are de facto nofail and invoke OOM
-	 * killer to move on while costly can fail and users are ready
-	 * to cope with that. 1/4 retries is rather arbitrary but we
-	 * would need much more detailed feedback from compaction to
-	 * make a better decision.
-	 */
-	if (order > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER)
-		max_retries /= 4;
-	if (compaction_retries <= max_retries)
-		return true;
-
-	return false;
-}
 #else
 static inline struct page *
 __alloc_pages_direct_compact(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order,
@@ -3311,6 +3264,8 @@ __alloc_pages_direct_compact(gfp_t gfp_mask, unsigned int order,
 	return NULL;
 }
 
+#endif /* CONFIG_COMPACTION */
+
 static inline bool
 should_compact_retry(struct alloc_context *ac, unsigned int order, int alloc_flags,
 		     enum compact_result compact_result,
@@ -3337,7 +3292,6 @@ should_compact_retry(struct alloc_context *ac, unsigned int order, int alloc_fla
 	}
 	return false;
 }
-#endif /* CONFIG_COMPACTION */
 
 /* Perform direct synchronous page reclaim */
 static int
-- 
2.8.1

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs