Re: [netfilter-core] kernel panic: Out of memory and no killable processes... (2)

[Kirill A. Shutemov]

On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 05:57:22PM +0100, Florian Westphal wrote:
> Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 08:23:57AM +0100, Florian Westphal wrote:
> > > > vmalloc() once became killable by commit 5d17a73a2ebeb8d1 ("vmalloc: back
> > > > off when the current task is killed") but then became unkillable by commit
> > > > b8c8a338f75e052d ("Revert "vmalloc: back off when the current task is
> > > > killed""). Therefore, we can't handle this problem from MM side.
> > > > Please consider adding some limit from networking side.
> > > 
> > > I don't know what "some limit" would be.  I would prefer if there was
> > > a way to supress OOM Killer in first place so we can just -ENOMEM user.
> > 
> > Just supressing OOM kill is a bad idea. We still leave a way to allocate
> > arbitrary large buffer in kernel.
> 
> Isn't that what we do everywhere in network stack?
> 
> I think we should try to allocate whatever amount of memory is needed
> for the given xtables ruleset, given that is what admin requested us to do.

Is it correct that "admin" in this case is root in random container?
I mean, can we get access to it with CLONE_NEWUSER|CLONE_NEWNET?

This can be fun.

> I also would not know what limit is sane -- I've seen setups with as much
> as 100k iptables rules, and that was 5 years ago.
> 
> And even if we add a "Xk rules" limit, it might be too much for
> low-memory systems, or not enough for whatever other use case there
> might be.

I hate what I'm saying, but I guess we need some tunable here.
Not sure what exactly.

-- 
 Kirill A. Shutemov