Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: [PATCH net v2 0/2] Revert the 'socket_alloc' life cycle change

From: SeongJae Park
Date: Wed May 06 2020 - 09:00:01 EST


TL; DR: It was not kernel's fault, but the benchmark program.

So, the problem is reproducible using the lebench[1] only. I carefully read
it's code again.

Before running the problem occurred "poll big" sub test, lebench executes
"context switch" sub test. For the test, it sets the cpu affinity[2] and
process priority[3] of itself to '0' and '-20', respectively. However, it
doesn't restore the values to original value even after the "context switch" is
finished. For the reason, "select big" sub test also run binded on CPU 0 and
has lowest nice value. Therefore, it can disturb the RCU callback thread for
the CPU 0, which processes the deferred deallocations of the sockets, and as a
result it triggers the OOM.

We confirmed the problem disappears by offloading the RCU callbacks from the
CPU 0 using rcu_nocbs=0 boot parameter or simply restoring the affinity and/or
priority.

Someone _might_ still argue that this is kernel problem because the problem
didn't occur on the old kernels prior to the Al's patches. However, setting
the affinity and priority was available because the program received the
permission. Therefore, it would be reasonable to blame the system
administrators rather than the kernel.

So, please ignore this patchset, apology for making confuse. If you still has
some doubts or need more tests, please let me know.

[1] https://github.com/LinuxPerfStudy/LEBench
[2] https://github.com/LinuxPerfStudy/LEBench/blob/master/TEST_DIR/OS_Eval.c#L820
[3] https://github.com/LinuxPerfStudy/LEBench/blob/master/TEST_DIR/OS_Eval.c#L822


Thanks,
SeongJae Park