Re: [RFC]: userspace memory reaping

[Minchan Kim]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 11:20:30AM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:

> > > I do have a vague recollection that we have discussed a kill(2) based
> > > approach as well in the past. Essentially SIG_KILL_SYNC which would
> > > not only send the signal but it would start a teardown of resources
> > > owned by the task - at least those we can remove safely. The interface
> > > would be much more simple and less tricky to use. You just make your
> > > userspace oom killer or potentially other users call SIG_KILL_SYNC which
> > > will be more expensive but you would at least know that as many
> > > resources have been freed as the kernel can afford at the moment.
> > 
> > Correct, my early RFC here
> > https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-mm/patch/20190411014353.113252-3-surenb@xxxxxxxxxx
> > was using a new flag for pidfd_send_signal() to request mm reaping by
> > oom-reaper kthread. IIUC you propose to have a new SIG_KILL_SYNC
> > signal instead of a new pidfd_send_signal() flag and otherwise a very
> > similar solution. Is my understanding correct?
> 
> Well, I think you shouldn't focus too much on the oom-reaper aspect
> of it. Sure it can be used for that but I believe that a new signal
> should provide a sync behavior. People more familiar with the process
> management would be better off defining what is possible for a new sync
> signal.  Ideally not only pro-active process destruction but also sync
> waiting until the target process is released so that you know that once
> kill syscall returns the process is gone.

If we approach with signal, I am not sure we need to create new signal
rather than pidfd and fsync(2) semantic.

Furthermore, process_madvise makes the work in the caller context but
signal might work somewhere else context depending on implemenation(
oom reaper or CPU resumed the task). I am not sure it it fulfils Suren's
requirement.

One more thing to think over: Even though we spent some overhead to
read /proc/pid/maps, we could make zapping in parallel in userspace
with multi thread approach. I am not sure what's the win since Suren
also care about zapping performance.