Re: [v6 2/4] mm, oom: cgroup-aware OOM killer

[Roman Gushchin]

On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 10:14:03AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Thu 24-08-17 15:58:01, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 04:13:37PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > > On Thu 24-08-17 14:58:42, Roman Gushchin wrote:
> [...]
> > > > Both ways are not ideal, and sum of the processes is not ideal too.
> > > > Especially, if you take oom_score_adj into account. Will you respect it?
> > > 
> > > Yes, and I do not see any reason why we shouldn't.
> > 
> > It makes things even more complicated.
> > Right now task's oom_score can be in (~ -total_memory, ~ +2*total_memory) range,
> > and it you're starting summing it, it can be multiplied by number of tasks...
> > Weird.
> 
> oom_score_adj is just a normalized bias so if tasks inside oom will use
> it the whole memcg will get accumulated bias from all such tasks so it
> is not completely off. I agree that the more tasks use the bias the more
> biased the whole memcg will be. This might or might not be a problem.
> As you are trying to reimplement the existing oom killer implementation
> I do not think we cannot simply ignore API which people are used to.
> 
> If this was a configurable oom policy then I could see how ignoring
> oom_score_adj is acceptable because it would be an explicit opt-in.
> 
> > It also will be different in case of system and memcg-wide OOM.
> 
> Why, we do honor oom_score_adj for the memcg OOM now and in fact the
> kernel memcg OOM killer shouldn't be very much different from the global
> one except for the tasks scope.
> 
> > > > I've started actually with such approach, but then found it weird.
> > > > 
> > > > > Besides that you have
> > > > > to check each task for over-killing anyway. So I do not see any
> > > > > performance merits here.
> > > > 
> > > > It's an implementation detail, and we can hopefully get rid of it at some point.
> > > 
> > > Well, we might do some estimations and ignore oom scopes but I that
> > > sounds really complicated and error prone. Unless we have anything like
> > > that then I would start from tasks and build up the necessary to make a
> > > decision at the higher level.
> > 
> > Seriously speaking, do you have an example, when summing per-process
> > oom_score will work better?
> 
> The primary reason I am pushing for this is to have the common iterator
> code path (which we have since Vladimir has unified memcg and global oom
> paths) and only parametrize the value calculation and victim selection.
> 
> > Especially, if we're talking about customizing oom_score calculation,
> > it makes no sence to me. How you will sum process timestamps?
> 
> Well, I meant you could sum oom_badness for your particular
> implementation. If we need some other policy then this wouldn't work and
> that's why I've said that I would like to preserve the current common
> code and only parametrize value calculation and victim selection...

I've spent some time to implement such a version.

It really became shorter and more existing code were reused,
howewer I've met a couple of serious issues:

1) Simple summing of per-task oom_score doesn't make sense.
   First, we calculate oom_score per-task, while should sum per-process values,
   or, better, per-mm struct. We can take only threa-group leader's score
   into account, but it's also not 100% accurate.
   And, again, we have a question what to do with per-task oom_score_adj,
   if we don't task the task's oom_score into account.

   Using memcg stats still looks to me as a more accurate and consistent
   way of estimating memcg memory footprint.

2) If we're treating tasks from not-kill-all cgroups as separate oom entities,
   and compare them with memcgs with kill-all flag, we definitely need
   per-task oom_priority to provide a clear way to compare entities.

   Otherwise we need per-memcg size-based oom_score_adj, which is not
   the best idea, as we agreed earlier.

Thanks!

Roman