Re: [PATCH] mm: memcontrol: fix occasional OOMs due to proportional memory.low reclaim

[Andrew Morton]

On Tue, 17 Aug 2021 14:05:06 -0400 Johannes Weiner <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> We've noticed occasional OOM killing when memory.low settings are in
> effect for cgroups. This is unexpected and undesirable as memory.low
> is supposed to express non-OOMing memory priorities between cgroups.
> 
> The reason for this is proportional memory.low reclaim. When cgroups
> are below their memory.low threshold, reclaim passes them over in the
> first round, and then retries if it couldn't find pages anywhere else.
> But when cgroups are slighly above their memory.low setting, page scan
> force is scaled down and diminished in proportion to the overage, to
> the point where it can cause reclaim to fail as well - only in that
> case we currently don't retry, and instead trigger OOM.
> 
> To fix this, hook proportional reclaim into the same retry logic we
> have in place for when cgroups are skipped entirely. This way if
> reclaim fails and some cgroups were scanned with dimished pressure,
> we'll try another full-force cycle before giving up and OOMing.

Which kernel version(s) do you think need this?