[PATCH] mm, oom: stop pre-mature high-order OOM killer invocations

[Michal Hocko]

31e49bfda184 ("mm, oom: protect !costly allocations some more for
!CONFIG_COMPACTION") was an attempt to reduce chances of pre-mature OOM
killer invocation for high order requests. It seemed to work for most
users just fine but it is far from bullet proof and obviously not
sufficient for Marc who has reported pre-mature OOM killer invocations
with 4.8 based kernels. 4.9 will all the compaction improvements seems
to be behaving much better but that would be too intrusive to backport
to 4.8 stable kernels. Instead this patch simply never declares OOM for
!costly high order requests. We rely on order-0 requests to do that in
case we are really out of memory. Order-0 requests are much more common
and so a risk of a livelock without any way forward is highly unlikely.

Reported-by: Marc MERLIN <marc@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Tested-by: Marc MERLIN <marc@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
---
 mm/page_alloc.c | 10 ++++++++++
 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+)

diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index a2214c64ed3c..7401e996009a 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -3161,6 +3161,16 @@ should_compact_retry(struct alloc_context *ac, unsigned int order, int alloc_fla
 	if (!order || order > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER)
 		return false;
 
+#ifdef CONFIG_COMPACTION
+	/*
+	 * This is a gross workaround to compensate a lack of reliable compaction
+	 * operation. We cannot simply go OOM with the current state of the compaction
+	 * code because this can lead to pre mature OOM declaration.
+	 */
+	if (order <= PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER)
+		return true;
+#endif
+
 	/*
 	 * There are setups with compaction disabled which would prefer to loop
 	 * inside the allocator rather than hit the oom killer prematurely.
-- 
2.10.2

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs