[PATCH] oom, memcg: clarify root memcg oom accounting

[Michal Hocko]

David Rientjes has pointed out that the current way how the root memcg
is accounted for the cgroup aware OOM killer is undocumented. Unlike
regular cgroups there is no accounting going on in the root memcg
(mostly for performance reasons). Therefore we are suming up oom_badness
of its tasks. This might result in an over accounting because of the
oom_score_adj setting. Document this for now.

Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
---
 Documentation/cgroup-v2.txt | 6 +++++-
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/cgroup-v2.txt b/Documentation/cgroup-v2.txt
index 2eaed1e2243d..7dff106bba57 100644
--- a/Documentation/cgroup-v2.txt
+++ b/Documentation/cgroup-v2.txt
@@ -1292,7 +1292,11 @@ the memory controller considers only cgroups belonging to the sub-tree
 of the OOM'ing cgroup.
 
 The root cgroup is treated as a leaf memory cgroup, so it's compared
-with other leaf memory cgroups and cgroups with oom_group option set.
+with other leaf memory cgroups and cgroups with oom_group option
+set. Due to internal implementation restrictions the size of the root
+cgroup is a cumulative sum of oom_badness of all its tasks (in other
+words oom_score_adj of each task is obeyed). This might change in the
+future.
 
 If there are no cgroups with the enabled memory controller,
 the OOM killer is using the "traditional" process-based approach.
-- 
2.15.1
-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs