On Thu, 2017-05-18 at 15:22 -0400, Johannes Weiner wrote: > On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 04:37:27AM +1000, Balbir Singh wrote: > > On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 3:30 AM, Michal Hocko <mho...@kernel.org> wrote: > > > On Thu 18-05-17 17:28:04, Roman Gushchin wrote: > > > > Traditionally, the OOM killer is operating on a process level. > > > > Under oom conditions, it finds a process with the highest oom score > > > > and kills it. > > > > > > > > This behavior doesn't suit well the system with many running > > > > containers. There are two main issues: > > > > > > > > 1) There is no fairness between containers. A small container with > > > > a few large processes will be chosen over a large one with huge > > > > number of small processes. > > > > > > > > 2) Containers often do not expect that some random process inside > > > > will be killed. So, in general, a much safer behavior is > > > > to kill the whole cgroup. Traditionally, this was implemented > > > > in userspace, but doing it in the kernel has some advantages, > > > > especially in a case of a system-wide OOM. > > > > > > > > To address these issues, cgroup-aware OOM killer is introduced. > > > > Under OOM conditions, it looks for a memcg with highest oom score, > > > > and kills all processes inside. > > > > > > > > Memcg oom score is calculated as a size of active and inactive > > > > anon LRU lists, unevictable LRU list and swap size. > > > > > > > > For a cgroup-wide OOM, only cgroups belonging to the subtree of > > > > the OOMing cgroup are considered. > > > > > > While this might make sense for some workloads/setups it is not a > > > generally acceptable policy IMHO. We have discussed that different OOM > > > policies might be interesting few years back at LSFMM but there was no > > > real consensus on how to do that. One possibility was to allow bpf like > > > mechanisms. Could you explore that path? > > > > I agree, I think it needs more thought. I wonder if the real issue is > > something > > else. For example > > > > 1. Did we overcommit a particular container too much? > > 2. Do we need something like https://lwn.net/Articles/604212/ to solve > > the problem? > > The occasional OOM kill is an unavoidable reality on our systems (and > I bet on most deployments). If we tried not to overcommit, we'd waste > a *lot* of memory. > > The problem is when OOM happens, we really want the biggest *job* to > get killed. Before cgroups, we assumed jobs were processes. But with > cgroups, the user is able to define a group of processes as a job, and > then an individual process is no longer a first-class memory consumer. > > Without a patch like this, the OOM killer will compare the sizes of > the random subparticles that the jobs in the system are composed of > and kill the single biggest particle, leaving behind the incoherent > remains of one of the jobs. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
I agree, but see my response on oom_notifiers in parallel that I sent to Roman. > > If you want to determine the most expensive car in a parking lot, you > can't go off and compare the price of one car's muffler with the door > handle of another, then point to a wind shield and yell "This is it!" > > You need to compare the cars as a whole with each other. > > > 3. We have oom notifiers now, could those be used (assuming you are > > interested > > in non memcg related OOM's affecting a container > > Right now, we watch for OOM notifications and then have userspace kill > the rest of a job. That works - somewhat. What remains is the problem > that I described above, that comparing individual process sizes is not > meaningful when the terminal memory consumer is a cgroup. Could the cgroup limit be used as the comparison point? stats inside of the memory cgroup? > > > 4. How do we determine limits for these containers? From a fariness > > perspective > > How do you mean? How do we set them up so that the larger job gets more of the limits as opposed to the small ones? Balbir Singh. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
