[patch] mm, oom: remove 3% bonus for CAP_SYS_ADMIN processes

From: David Rientjes
Date: Wed Mar 07 2018 - 18:52:24 EST


Since the 2.6 kernel, the oom killer has slightly biased away from
CAP_SYS_ADMIN processes by discounting some of its memory usage in
comparison to other processes.

This has always been implicit and nothing exactly relies on the behavior.

Gaurav notices that __task_cred() can dereference a potentially freed
pointer if the task under consideration is exiting because a reference to
the task_struct is not held.

Remove the CAP_SYS_ADMIN bias so that all processes are treated equally.

If any CAP_SYS_ADMIN process would like to be biased against, it is always
allowed to adjust /proc/pid/oom_score_adj.

Reported-by: Gaurav Kohli <gkohli@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
mm/oom_kill.c | 7 -------
1 file changed, 7 deletions(-)

diff --git a/mm/oom_kill.c b/mm/oom_kill.c
--- a/mm/oom_kill.c
+++ b/mm/oom_kill.c
@@ -224,13 +224,6 @@ unsigned long oom_badness(struct task_struct *p, struct mem_cgroup *memcg,
mm_pgtables_bytes(p->mm) / PAGE_SIZE;
task_unlock(p);

- /*
- * Root processes get 3% bonus, just like the __vm_enough_memory()
- * implementation used by LSMs.
- */
- if (has_capability_noaudit(p, CAP_SYS_ADMIN))
- points -= (points * 3) / 100;
-
/* Normalize to oom_score_adj units */
adj *= totalpages / 1000;
points += adj;