[RFC PATCH] mm, oom: disable dump_tasks by default

[Michal Hocko]

From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>

dump_tasks has been introduced by quite some time ago fef1bdd68c81
("oom: add sysctl to enable task memory dump"). It's primary purpose is
to help analyse oom victim selection decision. This has been certainly
useful at times when the heuristic to chose a victim was much more
volatile. Since a63d83f427fb ("oom: badness heuristic rewrite")
situation became much more stable (mostly because the only selection
criterion is the memory usage) and reports about a wrong process to
be shot down have become effectively non-existent.

dump_tasks can generate a lot of output to the kernel log. It is not
uncommon that even relative small system has hundreds of tasks running.
Generating a lot of output to the kernel log both makes the oom report
less convenient to process and also induces a higher load on the printk
subsystem which can lead to other problems (e.g. longer stalls to flush
all the data to consoles).

Therefore change the default of oom_dump_tasks to not print the task
list by default. The sysctl remains in place for anybody who might need
to get this additional information. The oom report still provides an
information about the allocation context and the state of the MM
subsystem which should be sufficient to analyse most of the oom
situations.

Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
---
 mm/oom_kill.c | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/mm/oom_kill.c b/mm/oom_kill.c
index eda2e2a0bdc6..d0353705c6e6 100644
--- a/mm/oom_kill.c
+++ b/mm/oom_kill.c
@@ -52,7 +52,7 @@
 
 int sysctl_panic_on_oom;
 int sysctl_oom_kill_allocating_task;
-int sysctl_oom_dump_tasks = 1;
+int sysctl_oom_dump_tasks;
 
 /*
  * Serializes oom killer invocations (out_of_memory()) from all contexts to
-- 
2.20.1