Re: [RFC PATCH 1/2] mm, oom: Introduce bpf_select_task

[Martin KaFai Lau]

> > > > First, I'm a bit concerned about implicit restrictions we apply to bpf programs
> > > > which will be executed potentially thousands times under a very heavy memory
> > > > pressure. We will need to make sure that they don't allocate (much) memory, don't
> > > > take any locks which might deadlock with other memory allocations etc.
> > > > It will potentially require hard restrictions on what these programs can and can't
> > > > do and this is something that the bpf community will have to maintain long-term.
> > >
> > > Right, BPF callbacks operating under OOM situations will be really
> > > constrained but this is more or less by definition. Isn't it?
> >
> > What do you mean?
>
> Callbacks cannot depend on any direct or indirect memory allocations.
> Dependencies on any sleeping locks (again directly or indirectly) is not
> allowed just to name the most important ones.
>
> > In general, the bpf community is trying to make it as generic as possible and
> > adding new and new features. Bpf programs are not as constrained as they were
> > when it's all started.

bpf supports different running context. For example, only non-sleepable bpf prog 
is allowed to run at the NIC driver. A sleepable bpf prog is only allowed to run 
at some bpf_lsm hooks that is known to be safe to call blocking 
bpf-helper/kfunc. From the bpf side, it ensures a non-sleepable bpf prog cannot 
do things that may block.

fwiw, Dave has recently proposed something for iterating the task vma 
(https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20230810183513.684836-4-davemarchevsky@xxxxxx/). 
Potentially, a similar iterator can be created for a bpf program to iterate 
cgroups and tasks.