Re: [mm] 4e2c82a409: ltp.overcommit_memory01.fail

From: Qian Cai
Date: Tue Jul 07 2020 - 07:43:53 EST




> On Jul 7, 2020, at 6:28 AM, Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Would you have any examples? Because I find this highly unlikely.
> OVERCOMMIT_NEVER only works when virtual memory is not largerly
> overcommited wrt to real memory demand. And that tends to be more of
> an exception rather than a rule. "Modern" userspace (whatever that
> means) tends to be really hungry with virtual memory which is only used
> very sparsely.
>
> I would argue that either somebody is running an "OVERCOMMIT_NEVER"
> friendly SW and this is a permanent setting or this is not used at all.
> At least this is my experience.
>
> So I strongly suspect that LTP test failure is not something we should
> really lose sleep over. It would be nice to find a way to flush existing
> batches but I would rather see a real workload that would suffer from
> this imprecision.

I hear you many times that you really donât care about those use cases unless you hear exactly people are using in your world.

For example, when you said LTP oom tests are totally artificial last time and how less you care about if they are failing, and I could only enjoy their efficiencies to find many issues like race conditions and bad error accumulation handling etc that your âreal world use casesâ are going to take ages or no way to flag them.

There are just too many valid use cases in this wild world. The difference is that I admit that I donât know or even aware all the use cases, and I donât believe you do as well.

If a patchset broke the existing behaviors that written exactly in the spec, it is then someone has to prove its innocent. For example, if nobody is going to rely on something like this now and future, and then fix the spec and explain exactly nobody should be rely upon.