On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 3:40 PM Jann Horn <jannh@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 6:50 AM Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > In modern systems it's not unusual to have a system component monitoring > > memory conditions of the system and tasked with keeping system memory > > pressure under control. One way to accomplish that is to kill > > non-essential processes to free up memory for more important ones. > > Examples of this are Facebook's OOM killer daemon called oomd and > > Android's low memory killer daemon called lmkd. > > For such system component it's important to be able to free memory > > quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately the time process takes to free > > up its memory after receiving a SIGKILL might vary based on the state > > of the process (uninterruptible sleep), size and OPP level of the core > > the process is running. > > In such situation it is desirable to be able to free up the memory of the > > process being killed in a more controlled way. > > Enable MADV_DONTNEED to be used with process_madvise when applied to a > > dying process to reclaim its memory. This would allow userspace system > > components like oomd and lmkd to free memory of the target process in > > a more predictable way. > > > > Signed-off-by: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@xxxxxxxxxx> > [...] > > @@ -1239,6 +1256,23 @@ SYSCALL_DEFINE5(process_madvise, int, pidfd, const struct iovec __user *, vec, > > goto release_task; > > } > > > > + if (madvise_destructive(behavior)) { > > + /* Allow destructive madvise only on a dying processes */ > > + if (!signal_group_exit(task->signal)) { > > + ret = -EINVAL; > > + goto release_mm; > > + } > > Technically Linux allows processes to share mm_struct without being in > the same thread group, so I'm not sure whether this check is good > enough? AFAICS the normal OOM killer deals with this case by letting > __oom_kill_process() always kill all tasks that share the mm_struct. Thanks for the comment Jann. You are right. I think replacing !signal_group_exit(task->signal) with task_will_free_mem(task) would address both your and Oleg's comments. IIUC, task_will_free_mem() calls __task_will_free_mem() on the task itself and on all processes sharing the mm_struct ensuring that they are all dying.