On Tue, 2012-05-01 at 18:36 +0300, Avi Kivity wrote: > > > What bounds the amount of memory waiting to be freed during an rcu grace > > > period? > > > > Most RCU implementations don't have limits, so that could be quite a > > lot. I think preemptible RCU has a batch limit at which point it tries > > rather hard to force a grace period, but I'm not sure if even that > > provides a hard limit. > > > > Practically though, I haven't had reports of PPC/Sparc going funny > > because of this. > > It could be considered a DoS if a user is able to free page tables > faster than rcu is able to recycle them, possibly triggering the oom > killer (should that force a grace period before firing from the hip?) One would think that would be a good thing, yes. However I cannot seem to find anything like that in the current OOM killer. David, Paul, I seem to have vague recollections of a discussion about RCU vs OOM, what was the resolution (if anything) and would something like the below make sense? --- mm/oom_kill.c | 3 +++ 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+) diff --git a/mm/oom_kill.c b/mm/oom_kill.c index 46bf2ed5..244a371 100644 --- a/mm/oom_kill.c +++ b/mm/oom_kill.c @@ -607,6 +607,9 @@ int try_set_zonelist_oom(struct zonelist *zonelist, gfp_t gfp_mask) struct zone *zone; int ret = 1; + synchronize_sched(); + synchronize_rcu(); + spin_lock(&zone_scan_lock); for_each_zone_zonelist(zone, z, zonelist, gfp_zone(gfp_mask)) { if (zone_is_oom_locked(zone)) { -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html