Re: [v7 5/5] mm, oom: cgroup v2 mount option to disable cgroup-aware OOM killer

[David Rientjes]

On Thu, 7 Sep 2017, Christopher Lameter wrote:

> > I am not sure this is how things evolved actually. This is way before
> > my time so my git log interpretation might be imprecise. We do have
> > oom_badness heuristic since out_of_memory has been introduced and
> > oom_kill_allocating_task has been introduced much later because of large
> > boxes with zillions of tasks (SGI I suspect) which took too long to
> > select a victim so David has added this heuristic.
> 
> Nope. The logic was required for tasks that run out of memory when the
> restriction on the allocation did not allow the use of all of memory.
> cpuset restrictions and memory policy restrictions where the prime
> considerations at the time.
> 
> It has *nothing* to do with zillions of tasks. Its amusing that the SGI
> ghost is still haunting the discussion here. The company died a couple of
> years ago finally (ok somehow HP has an "SGI" brand now I believe). But
> there are multiple companies that have large NUMA configurations and they
> all have configurations where they want to restrict allocations of a
> process to subset of system memory. This is even more important now that
> we get new forms of memory (NVDIMM, PCI-E device memory etc). You need to
> figure out what to do with allocations that fail because the *allowed*
> memory pools are empty.
> 

We already had CONSTRAINT_CPUSET at the time, this was requested by Paul 
and acked by him in https://marc.info/?l=linux-mm&m=118306851418425.