On Wed 20-06-18 21:21:21, Tetsuo Handa wrote: > On 2018/06/20 20:55, Michal Hocko wrote: > > On Wed 20-06-18 20:20:38, Tetsuo Handa wrote: > >> Sleeping with oom_lock held can cause AB-BA lockup bug because > >> __alloc_pages_may_oom() does not wait for oom_lock. Since > >> blocking_notifier_call_chain() in out_of_memory() might sleep, sleeping > >> with oom_lock held is currently an unavoidable problem. > > > > Could you be more specific about the potential deadlock? Sleeping while > > holding oom lock is certainly not nice but I do not see how that would > > result in a deadlock assuming that the sleeping context doesn't sleep on > > the memory allocation obviously. > > "A" is "owns oom_lock" and "B" is "owns CPU resources". It was demonstrated > at "mm,oom: Don't call schedule_timeout_killable() with oom_lock held." > proposal.
This is not a deadlock but merely a resource starvation AFAIU. > But since you don't accept preserving the short sleep which is a heuristic for > reducing the possibility of AB-BA lockup, the only way we would accept will be > wait for the owner of oom_lock (e.g. by s/mutex_trylock/mutex_lock/ or > whatever) > which is free of heuristic and free of AB-BA lockup. > > > > >> As a preparation for not to sleep with oom_lock held, this patch brings > >> OOM notifier callbacks to outside of OOM killer, with two small behavior > >> changes explained below. > > > > Can we just eliminate this ugliness and remove it altogether? We do not > > have that many notifiers. Is there anything fundamental that would > > prevent us from moving them to shrinkers instead? > > > > For long term, it would be possible. But not within this patch. For example, > I think that virtio_balloon wants to release memory only when we have no > choice but OOM kill. If virtio_balloon trivially releases memory, it will > increase the risk of killing the entire guest by OOM-killer from the host > side. I would _prefer_ to think long term here. The sleep inside the oom lock is not something real workload are seeing out there AFAICS. Adding quite some code to address such a case doesn't justify the inclusion IMHO. -- Michal Hocko SUSE Labs
