Re: [PATCH 00/10] OOM Debug print selection and additional information

[Qian Cai]

On Mon, 2019-08-26 at 12:36 -0700, Edward Chron wrote:
> This patch series provides code that works as a debug option through
> debugfs to provide additional controls to limit how much information
> gets printed when an OOM event occurs and or optionally print additional
> information about slab usage, vmalloc allocations, user process memory
> usage, the number of processes / tasks and some summary information
> about these tasks (number runable, i/o wait), system information
> (#CPUs, Kernel Version and other useful state of the system),
> ARP and ND Cache entry information.
> 
> Linux OOM can optionally provide a lot of information, what's missing?
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Linux provides a variety of detailed information when an OOM event occurs
> but has limited options to control how much output is produced. The
> system related information is produced unconditionally and limited per
> user process information is produced as a default enabled option. The
> per user process information may be disabled.
> 
> Slab usage information was recently added and is output only if slab
> usage exceeds user memory usage.
> 
> Many OOM events are due to user application memory usage sometimes in
> combination with the use of kernel resource usage that exceeds what is
> expected memory usage. Detailed information about how memory was being
> used when the event occurred may be required to identify the root cause
> of the OOM event.
> 
> However, some environments are very large and printing all of the
> information about processes, slabs and or vmalloc allocations may
> not be feasible. For other environments printing as much information
> about these as possible may be needed to root cause OOM events.
> 

For more in-depth analysis of OOM events, people could use kdump to save a
vmcore by setting "panic_on_oom", and then use the crash utility to analysis the
 vmcore which contains pretty much all the information you need.

The downside of that approach is that this is probably only for enterprise use-
cases that kdump/crash may be tested properly on enterprise-level distros while
the combo is more broken for developers on consumer distros due to kdump/crash
could be affected by many kernel subsystems and have a tendency to be broken
fairly quickly where the community testing is pretty much light.